Home Network Devices Research Articles

Understanding the factors that motivate South African home fibre users to protect their home networking devices: a protection motivation theory

Purpose As home users are increasingly responsible for securing their computing devices and home networks, there is a growing need to develop interventions to assist them in protecting their home networking devices, which are vulnerable to attack. To this end, this paper aims to examine the motivating factors that drive South African fibre users to protect their home networking devices. Design/methodology/approach Using the protection motivation theory as the primary framework, a measurement instrument comprising 53 questionnaire items was developed to measure 13 constructs. The study collected empirical data from a sample of 392 South African home fibre users and evaluated the research model using structural equation modelling. Findings The evaluation showed a good fit, with 12 out of 15 predicted hypotheses being accepted for the final research model, contributing to the understanding of the factors that motivate home users to protect their home networking devices. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to model the factors that drive South African home fibre users to protect their home networking devices. Knowing these factors could help home internet service providers and security software vendors of home products to develop security interventions that could assist home fibre users to secure their home networking devices.

Dynamic Inference From IoT Traffic Flows Under Concept Drifts in Residential ISP Networks

Millions of vulnerable consumer IoT devices in home networks are the enabler for cyber crimes putting user privacy and Internet security at risk. Internet service providers (ISPs) are best poised to mitigate risks by automatically inferring active IoT devices per household and notifying users of vulnerable ones. Developing a scalable inference method that can perform robustly across thousands of home networks is a non-trivial task. This paper focuses on the challenges of developing and applying datadriven inference models when labeled data of device behaviors is limited and the distribution of data changes across time and space domains (concept drifts). Our contributions are fourfold: (1) We collect and analyze more than six million network traffic flows of 24 types of consumer IoT devices from 12 real homes over six weeks to highlight the challenge of temporal and spatial concept drifts in network behaviors of IoT devices -we publicly release our training and testing instances data; (2) We analyze the performance of two inference strategies, namely “global inference” (a model trained on a combined set of all labeled data from training homes) and “contextualized inference” (several models each trained on the labeled data from a training home) in the presence of concept drifts; (3) To manage concept drifts, we develop a method that dynamically applies the “best” model (from a set) to network traffic of unseen homes during the testing phase, yielding better performance in a fifth of scenarios when the labels are available for the testing data (ideal but unrealistic settings); and (4) We develop a method to automatically select the best model without needing labels of unseen data (a realistic inference) and show that it can achieve 94% of the ideal model’s accuracy.

Using manufacturer usage descriptions for IoT network security: An experimental investigation of smart home network devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) has shown significant growth in the past decades. Recently, IoT networks have been subject to cybersecurity threats on multiple fronts. A lack of improvement in IoT infrastructures' cybersecurity may result in challenges with a broad impact, such as DDoS attacks that target global DNS services. This paper reviews existing solutions to mitigate attacks on and from IoT networks. As a specific mitigation approach, we propose the use of a standardized whitelisting method, namely Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD), which provides enhanced explainability over machine learning-based approaches and is complementary to them. For evaluating the use of MUD in IoT networks, we report a case study, which we conducted through traffic analysis of two IoT devices by detecting recognizable and distinctive traffic patterns, which demonstrate the feasibility of MUD-based intrusion prevention.

Design and Implementation of Smart Home Network using Cisco Packet Tracer

Technology has become a critical part of our daily activities and routine life in the present day scenario. The need of the hour is to devise a smart home that will be able to control the operation of electronic devices via a smartphone. This concept, while absurd to imagine, can be easily implemented efficiently using a package tracking software which includes IoT functions for control and simulation of a smart home network. IoT technology has had a huge boom in the tech industry in the recent past. IoT, better known as Internet of Things, can be applied to several real time scenarios, such as home automation, treatment, campus, office, etc. In this paper, we will be focusing on a safe home automation system that will be including modules such as: smoke detection, humiture monitoring, motion detection, temperature monitoring and solar panel controlling using smart battery. The aim of our research is to devise a simulation network of smart devices which will be in control of the end-user remotely and implement the concept of smart home automation. This project will make use of the Cisco Packet Tracer to monitor the IoT devices in the smart home network. Simulation results have shown that these smart devices can be connected in a network to the home portal and objects can be successfully monitored which proves that such a model can be used for real life implementation in the user’s home.

The planning of smart elderly housing in Dubai with IoT technologies

PurposeThis paper aims to optimize the smart elderly housing planning with IoT (internet of things) technologies for an aging society in Dubai. To reflect the IoT technologies in the elderly housing, the characteristics of the IoT home network devices, applied to Ajman University (AU) testbed and smart services model with the IoT technologies are thoroughly analyzed.Design/methodology/approachTo extract the optimal smart elderly housing model in Dubai, the Korean smart home model from smart cities in Korea was used to implement the testbed at AU. In total, 100 users survey had been performed to adjust the Korean model to local culture/context.FindingsIt was analyzed that convenience and functionality are factors that must be provided. The security system was pointed out as a common denominator for future enhancements. When IoT technologies are applied to elderly housing, it should focus on the safety and health management of the elderly.Social implicationsDubai had announced a strategy to transform into a Smart City in 2014 and the strategy had included 100 initiatives. The base unit of smart homes, however, was not covered and furthermore as society grows older, the priority for IoT technologies application in the smart home should be focused on smart elderly housing, as the elderly is equivalent to the handicapped due to deteriorated physical abilities.Originality/valueThe characteristics of the IoT home network devices applied to the AU testbed and smart services model with the IoT technologies are thoroughly analyzed.

DEVS-IoT: performance evaluation of smart home devices network

Advances in electronics and connectivity have enabled a wide range of applications that can harness data collection for better decision making and an improved lifestyle. The Internet of Things (IoT) provides the communication infrastructure that allows devices with sensing and control capabilities to be connected within a home network. Smart home systems are considered one of the prominent applications in IoT, where it is possible to control home devices to achieve a better usage in terms of cost and comfort. However, smart home networks contain a wide range of devices and finding an optimal schedule for their working hours is an NP-hard problem. Hence, rather than using mathematical optimization to find optimal solutions, this paper proposes a modeling and simulation methods in order to provide good decisions and recommendations for devices’ scheduling. Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) formalism is used to develop a model of a smart home network. The devices are categorized into two groups: monitoring devices and control devices. Monitoring devices include sensors that capture climate, energy, power, performance, and occupant’s behavioral data. Control devices send signals remotely for setting and controlling different devices in the smart home network. The behavior in terms of power usage and cost is simulated under different scenarios and settings. The simulation results show that less energy consumption can be achieved if users adopt a behavior where the schedule of three devices is changed every week. As a result, the proposed method can be utilized to make better decisions in setting devices parameters and evaluating the performance of the smart devices network under different conditions, scenarios, and settings.

ForChaos: Real Time Application DDoS Detection Using Forecasting and Chaos Theory in Smart Home IoT Network

Recently, D/DoS attacks have been launched by zombie IoT devices in smart home networks. They pose a great threat to network systems with Application Layer DDoS attacks being especially hard to detect due to their stealth and seemingly legitimacy. In this paper, we propose ForChaos, a lightweight detection algorithm for IoT devices, which is based on forecasting and chaos theory to identify flooding and DDoS attacks. For every time-series behaviour collected, a forecasting-technique prediction is generated, based on a number of features, and the error between the two values is calculated. In order to assess the error of the forecasting from the actual value, the Lyapunov exponent is used to detect potential malicious behaviour. In NS-3 we evaluate our detection algorithm through a series of experiments in flooding and slow-rate DDoS attacks. The results are presented and discussed in detail and compared with related studies, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.

Remotely Access “My” Smart Home in Private: An Anti-Tracking Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme

Smart home is one of the key applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), which allows users to control the smart devices in their houses through the Internet. However, a smart home system also faces severe challenges in terms of privacy and confidentiality when users are allowed to remotely access it. Despite the recent research efforts on authentication schemes to improve the security aspects of a smart home, there are still unsolved problems. On the one hand, most of the existing schemes focus on secure authentication and communication via a trusted third party without taking its privacy leakage into consideration. On the other hand, many protocols enable the users to directly authenticate themselves to a large number of smart devices in the smart home network, which is often inefficient and inconvenient. To cope with these issues, we propose a smart home system model based on Internet services, like if this then that (IFTTT), and design an anti-tracking mutual authentication scheme with a key agreement element in it. Specifically, our scheme introduces an IFTTT home gateway as the control commands' executor and the security guard to allow a user to remotely access a smart home system privately. The proposed scheme employs the elliptic curves' cryptography (ECC) algorithm, nonces, XOR, and cryptographical hash functions to achieve mutual authentication with security features, such as anonymity and perfect forward security. The security analysis and performance comparison results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves secure and private authentication.

Towards eco-friendly home networking

Home networking is becoming increasingly sophisticated as users connect ever more networked devices. In the past, home networks typically consisted of a simple router and maybe a few computers. Now, high speed wireless networks are commonplace in homes with a large number of devices: TVs, game consoles, home theater systems, and even home automation systems. This is in addition to standard computing devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, smart phones and network-attached storage. Smart homes with many wireless sensors to improve quality of life are also emerging. However, home network devices such as routers and broadband modems have been designed for maximum performance with limited consideration of energy optimization when the devices are idle or serving low bandwidth traffic. The goal of this paper is to analyze network activity of wireless home routers, investigate opportunities for energy saving, and present mechanisms for improving the energy efficiency of wireless home routers. We analyzed five week-long traces of home network traffic and identified a number of energy saving opportunities. Through detailed trace-based simulation and implementation measurements we are able to reduce the wireless energy consumption of the home router by 12–59% while incurring only minor delay of the initial packet delivery after leaving the low energy state. Modification of an actual router's behavior shows that the proposed energy optimizations are feasible with existing clients.

스마트 단말 이용 원격 홈 제어 서비스를 위한 적응형 변환 엔진

In this paper, we propose an adaptive transformation engine that provides smart devices with optimal user interfaces and media contents to their characteristics so as to conveniently control home networks remotely using smart devices in the wired and wireless home networks which various kinds of smart devices and home network devices are connected. The proposed engine dynamically transforms UI contents and transfers them using device profiles and UI transformation policies to make it suitable for smart devices. Moreover, the proposed engine offers suitable media contents for smart devices through capabilities of real-time media transcoding and streaming considering device and media profiles.

Software-defined home networking devices for multi-home visual sharing

Existing home-networking protocols do not robustly incorporate universal connectivity among multiple homes, which leaves their use restricted to a single home. In addition, even in a single home network, new functional requirements ask for more diversified forms of networking control. This paper presents in-home consumer electronic devices that incorporate the emerging SDN (Software Defined Networking) paradigm. The proposed devices enable ondemand provisioning for protocol-agnostic home networking and thus provide a high degree of flexibility for intra-home networking as well as wider connectivity for inter-home networking. The feasibility of the prototype devices is verified by realizing a multi-home visual-sharing scenario and by supporting diverse future scenarios.

지능형 홈네트워크 디바이스간의 상호연동 미들웨어 Adaptor 설계에 관한 연구

지능형 홈네트워크 디바이스간의 상호연동 미들웨어 Adaptor 설계에 관한 연구

A Lightweight Software Design for Seamless Home Multimedia Services

People now possess various home-networked devices that are capable of upgraded computing, extensible storage, multimedia processing, and network connectivity functions. With broadband home networking technologies, such devices can perform media content distribution in a home network and play shared media files in a n etworked fashion. When users with portable home- networked devices are free to move in residential areas, they can cause the so-called playing discontinuity problem because device movement can tear down any ongoing network connections for data transferring and then terminate any ongoing media playing services in home networks. To contend with this problem, this paper proposes a software architecture for seamless home multimedia services in ubiquitous home computing environments. This architecture design contains three functional components, including network connection, media transfer, and media playing functionalities, all of which are designed on the base of standard Internet protocol suites. As a result of a lightweight software design, the propos ed architecture is platform-independent and can be activated inside an application-level execution context. Home-networked devices can incorporate this application-level software without need to modify underlying hardware configurations, system kernel modules , and operating systems. Prototype development implements the software packages and applications, which are able to keep ongoing media playing services from playing discontinuity and interruption when home-networked devices move in an administrative network domain. Scenario demonstration shows that the proposed software architecture is able to provide seamless home multimedia services with better user experience for multimedia entertainment in residential environments.

Characterizing home network traffic: an inside view

The rapid spread of residential broadband connections and Internet-capable consumer devices in home networks has changed the landscape of Internet traffic. To gain a deep understanding of Internet traffic for home networks, this paper develops a traffic monitoring platform that collects and analyzes home network traffic via programmable home routers and traffic profiling servers. Using traffic data captured from real home networks, we present traffic characteristics in home networks and then apply principal component analysis to uncover temporal correlations among application ports. In light of prevalent unwanted traffic on the Internet, we characterize the intensity, sources, and port diversity of unwanted traffic toward home networks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study to characterize network traffic of Internet-capable devices from inside home network.

TESA: a temporal and spatial information aware writeback policy for home network-attached storage devices

Home Network-Attached Storage (NAS) provides an easy way for data sharing and backup among multiple consumer electronic devices in home networks. Because of large capacity and cost effectiveness, disks are widely adopted in home NAS devices. In addition, data writes are common for many home NAS devices since these devices are usually used for data storage and backup. A writeback policy selects which dirty buffers are to be flushed to the disk, which is critical to the system performance under write-intensive workloads. In this paper, an intelligent writeback policy for home NAS called TESA is proposed. In contrast to most existing writeback policies, TESA considers both temporal and spatial information of the dirty buffers to improve the writeback performance. Considering the temporal information helps to reduce the frequency of writing back recently used dirty buffers, and hence leads to reduced write traffic. Considering the spatial information causes a reduction in the overall seek time and rotation delay of the dirty buffer writeback. The TESA writeback policy was implemented on a NAS evaluation board running Linux kernel. The performance results shows that TESA yields a significant performance improvement (i.e., up to 33.1%) over the original writeback policy of Linux. Moreover, TESA outperforms the policy that considers only the temporal information of the dirty buffers by up to 21.0%, and it also has up to 10.9% performance improvement over a previous policy that considers both the temporal and spatial information.

A tool for the generation of realistic network workload for emerging networking scenarios

Internet workload is a mix of many and complex sources. Therefore, its accurate and realistic replication is a difficult and challenging task. Such difficulties are exacerbated by the multidimensional heterogeneity and scale of the current Internet combined with its constant evolution. The study and generation of network workload is a moving target, both in terms of actors (devices, access networks, protocols, applications, services) and in terms of case studies (the interest expands from performance analysis to topics like network neutrality and security). In order to keep up with the new questions that arise and with the consequent new technical challenges, networking research needs to continuously update its tools. In this paper, we describe the main properties that a network workload generator should have today, and we present a tool for the generation of realistic network workload that can be used for the study of emerging networking scenarios. In particular, we discuss (i) how it tackles the main issues challenging the representative replication of network workload, and (ii) our design choices and its advanced features that make it suitable to analyze complex and emerging network scenarios. To highlight how our tool advances the state-of-the-art, we finally report some experimental results related to the study of hot topics like (a) broadband Internet performance and network neutrality violations; (b) RFC-based security and performance assessment of home network devices; (c) performance analysis of multimedia communications.

A P2P-to-UPnP Proxy Gateway Architecture for Home Multimedia Content Distribution

Deploying advanced home networking technologies and modern home-networked devices in residential environments provides a playground for new home applications and services. Because home multimedia entertainment is among the most essential home applications, this paper presents an appealing home media content sharing scenario: home-networked devices can discover neighboring devices and share local media content, as well as enormous amounts of Internet media content in a convenient and networked manner. This ideal scenario differs from traditional usages that merely offer local media content and require tedious manual operations of connection setup and file transfer among various devices. To achieve this goal, this study proposes a proxy gateway architecture for home multimedia content distribution. The proposed architecture integrates several functional mechanisms, including UPnP-based device discovery, home gateway, Internet media provision, and in-home media content delivery. This design addresses several inherent limitations of device heterogeneity and network interoperability on home and public networks, and allows diverse home-networked devices to play media content in an identical and networked manner. Prototypical implementation of the proposed proxy gateway architecture develops a proof-of-concept software, integrating a BitTorrent peer-to-peer client, a UPnP protocol stack, and a UPnP AV media server, as well as media distribution and management components on the OSGi home gateway platform. Practical demonstration shows the proposed design and scenario realization, offering users an unlimited volume of media content for home multimedia entertainment.

Dynamic adaptation of contention window for consumer devices in WiMedia home networks

WiMedia ultra-wideband technology is an attractive transmission solution for high-data-rate multimedia streaming and high-quality consumer electronic devices in wireless multimedia home networks. However, the contention-based protocol of WiMedia medium access control (MAC) may cause channel collisions and throughput degradation as the number of consumer devices in the network increases. In order to resolve this problem and to reduce channel access latency, we propose a dynamic adaptation of contention window (DACW) scheme in which the contention window size for the optimal transmission probability is derived after traffic information has been obtained by means of distributed beaconing procedures. The trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that the DACW scheme outperforms the existing channel access schemes (i.e., prioritized channel access) in WiMedia MAC under different situations, especially when the number of contending nodes is large.

Provisioning QoS for WiFi-enabled Portable Devices in Home Networks

Wi-Fi-enabled portable devices have recently been introduced into the consumer electronics market. These devices download or upload content, from or to a host machine, such as a personal computer, a laptop, a home gateway, or a media server. This paper investigates the fairness among multiple Wi-Fi-enabled portable devices in a home network when they are simultaneously communicated with the host machine. First, we present that, a simple IEEE 802.11-based home network suffers from unfairness, and the fairness is exaggerated by the wireless link errors. This unfairness is due to the asymmetric response of the TCP to data-packet loss and to acknowledgment-packet loss, and the wireless link errors that occur in the proximity of any node; the errors affect other wireless devices through the interaction at the interface queue of the home gateway. We propose a QoS-provisioning framework in order to achieve per-device fairness and service differentiation. For this purpose, we introduce the medium access price, which denotes an aggregate value of network-wide traffic load, per-device link usage, and per-device link error rate. We implemented the proposed framework in the ns-2 simulator, and carried out a simulation study to evaluate its performance with respect to fairness, service differentiation, loss and delay. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method enforces the per-device fairness, regardless of the number of devices present and regardless of the level of wireless link errors; furthermore it achieves high link utilization with only a small amount of frame losses.

Integrating service discovery technologies in OSGi platform

This paper describes the service discovery and interaction for home network devices using heterogeneous standards and protocols. OSGi was proposed to allow several kinds of services coming from different providers to be loaded and run on a gateway. We present a residential gateway based on the OSGi architecture for a smart home network. We combine the SLP SA/DA, the UPnP control point and the SIP UA into the gateway to achieve automated device discovery, registry, and management. Application examples are introduced and the implementation results show that our gateway can provide automatic heterogeneous service or device discovery, registry, and management.