User's Home Network Research Articles

IoTBeholder

With the deployment of a growing number of smart home IoT devices, privacy leakage has become a growing concern. Prior work on privacy-invasive device localization, classification, and activity identification have proven the existence of various privacy leakage risks in smart home environments. However, they only demonstrate limited threats in real world due to many impractical assumptions, such as having privileged access to the user's home network. In this paper, we identify a new end-to-end attack surface using IoTBeholder, a system that performs device localization, classification, and user activity identification. IoTBeholder can be easily run and replicated on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices such as mobile phones or personal computers, enabling attackers to infer user's habitual behaviors from smart home Wi-Fi traffic alone. We set up a testbed with 23 IoT devices for evaluation in the real world. The result shows that IoTBeholder has good device classification and device activity identification performance. In addition, IoTBeholder can infer the users' habitual behaviors and automation rules with high accuracy and interpretability. It can even accurately predict the users' future actions, highlighting a significant threat to user privacy that IoT vendors and users should highly concern.

A Secure Internet of Things Smart Home Network: Design and Configuration

Many home IoT devices are joining IoT networks by gaining access to some home gateway that configures smart, multimedia, and home networks. To enable secure IoT-based home networking services, (1) an IoT network should be effectively designed and configured with a IoT server, (2) a messaging protocol is required to exchange information between the IoT server and IoT devices, and (3) the home gateway should monitor all safety aspects in both inbound and outbound traffic of the home network. However, not all home network users put in consideration the need for an adequate security posture. Instead, many users still rely on the minimum home network security by setting an easiest-to-guess password to restrict unauthorized access to their home gateway. In this paper, we propose a network design and configuration that enables secure IoT services with MQTT messaging protocol for home networks. With the proposed network design, a home network is interconnected to external networks through a home gateway. To separate the IoT-subnet from other parts of home network, the home gateway subdivides a home network into an inside-subnet and an IoT-subnet with a private IP address using subnet masking. The IoT server, located in the IoT-subnet can be implemented with either a general HTTP server or a security server that acts as an MQTT broker. The secure communications among network entities are governed by a home gateway operating a well-configured extended access control. The effectiveness of the proposed design and configuration is verified through a simulation by showing that it does not impose any significant performance degradation for reinforced security. We expect the proposed configuration to help facilitate interconnection among heterogeneous network entities.

Refining network intents for self-driving networks

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer an opportunity for the adoption of self-driving networks. However, network operators or home-network users still do not have the right tools to exploit these new advancements in AI, since they have to rely on low-level languages to specify network policies. Intent-based networking (IBN) allows operators to specify high-level policies that dictate how the network should behave without worrying how they are translated into configuration commands in the network devices. However, the existing research proposals for IBN fail to exploit the knowledge and feedback from the network operator to validate or improve the translation of intents. In this paper, we introduce a novel intent-refinement process that uses machine learning and feedback from the operator to translate the operator's utterances into network configurations. Our refinement process uses a sequence-to-sequence learning model to extract intents from natural language and the feedback from the operator to improve learning. The key insight of our process is an intermediate representation that resembles natural language that is suitable to collect feedback from the operator but is structured enough to facilitate precise translations. Our prototype interacts with a network operator using natural language and translates the operator input to the intermediate representation before translating to SDN rules. Our experimental results show that our process achieves a correlation coefficient squared ( i.e., R-squared) of 0.99 for a dataset with 5000 entries and the operator feedback significantly improves the accuracy of our model.

Development of Home Network Sustainable Interface Tools

The home network has become a norm in today's life. Previous studies have shown that home network management is a problem for users who are not in the field of network technology. The existing network management tools are far too difficult to understand by ordinary home network users. Its interface is complex, and does not address the home user's needs in their daily use. This paper presents an interactive network management tool, which emphasizes support features for home network users. The tool combine interactive visual appearance with persuasive approach that support sustainability. It is not only understandable to all categories of home network users, but also acts as a feature for the user to achieve usability.

Security technologies based on a home gateway for making smart homes secure

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify security technologies that are essential in making home network systems secure and to describe specialized security mechanisms for the home network and the relationships among them.Design/methodology/approachThe research model is designed to support three functions: authentication, authorization, and security policy. Authentication is tested in several methodologies such as id/pw, certificate, or bio; authorization is tested using RBAC methodologies; and security policy is specified using newly‐designed script language, such as xHDL.FindingsThe findings for “authentication” suggest that home network users can access services conveniently and securely. In addition, the findings for “security policy” suggest that security policy for home network requires specialized rather than general specification.Practical implicationsThe paper identifies three security functions essential for home network: authentication that supports most existing authentication mechanisms, so as to maximize user accessibility; authorization that is middleware‐independent and beyond the physical transport layer; and security policy optimized for the home network environment.Originality/valueThe paper focuses on an implementation‐based security model for the home network. Though interest and research in home network security are increasing, only limited authentication applications have been adopted in real deployment up to now. This paper introduces an integrated security model and emphasizes safety and convenience so as to promote reliability in home network services.

Home Network Device Authentication: Device Authentication Framework and Device Certificate Profile

As home devices have various functions and have improved computing power and networking ability, home device authentication has become increasingly important for improving the security of home network users. Moreover, device authentication supplies user convenience for the home network service user because it can replace the user authentication required for the used home network service. In addition, the safety of the home network can be strengthened if device authentication is considered in addition to the authentication and access control for the home network user. In this paper, we describe home device authentication, which is a basic and essential element of home network security. We propose a home device authentication framework, home device registration, method of issuing certificates and a home device certificate profile. Our home device certificate profile is based on the Internet X.509 certificate. In short, our device authentication concept can offer convenience and security to users of a home network service.

Design, implementation, and evaluation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System for home networks

Bandwidth aggregation is a promising technology that can speed up access to the Internet by bandwidth sharing and multi-path communication. Current Bandwidth Aggregation Systems (BASs) deployed in public networks provide limited performance and flexibility when they are directly used in home networking environments. To reap the full performance benefits of BASs in home networks, they need to be easily and dynamically programmable by home network users. We present the design and implementation of a Programmable Bandwidth Aggregation System (PBAS) that can provide home network users improved performance when sharing bandwidth for activities that access the Internet. We also present an empirical performance evaluation of the system and we demonstrate the superior efficiency of our proposed PBAS over a traditional BAS in terms of computational overheads, loadable code, throughput performance, and programmability.

Design and Analysis of a Mobility Gateway for GPRS–WLAN Integration

This paper presents the design and analysis of general packet radio service (GPRS)-wireless local area network (WLAN) mobility gateway (GWMG) for the integration of GPRS and WLANs. The interworking between GPRS and WLANs is achieved by the GWMG that resides on the border of GPRS and WLAN systems. The design goal is to minimize the modifications in GPRS and WLANs as both systems are already widely available. By deploying the GWMG, users can seamlessly roam among the two systems. Unlike other related work, the proposed GWMG could be used when either the GPRS or WLAN is a user's home network. Both mathematical analysis and simulation are developed to analyze the performance. The proposed GWMG has also been implemented in a testbed comprising a commercial GPRS system. The results show that the GWMG could achieve a design goal that will effectively integrate GPRS and WLANs.

A decentralized approach for topology discovery in home netwo

As electronic home appliances become smart, there have been many attempts to connect these appliances with a network. Accordingly, a concept of home networks has been emerged. Since most home network users do not have experiences or knowledge of network management, home networks have to be easily managed with minimal efforts of users. This paper presents a novel system for topology discovery and management in home networks. This system is fully distributed and automatically discovers topology information with minimal user configuration. It considers heterogeneous network media such as Ethernet, WLAN, and IEEE 1394. It also provides QoS information by measuring available bandwidth. We have implemented this system on Linux and present experiment results to show the effectiveness of the system

Effect of personal mobility management in mobile communication networks

Personal mobility (PM) is one of the key issues in realizing a personal communications service (PCS) in emerging third-generation mobile communication networks such as IMT-2000. It can be realized through the universal personal telecommunication (UPT) service. Two PM management schemes are proposed to manage PM information related to UPT users for incoming call (incall) registration/deregistration, incall registration reset by a mobile terminal (MT) owner, and incall delivery to UPT users in mobile communication networks based on the location information managed by the user's home network. The relative cost, i.e., the ratio of cost per unit time for supporting both terminal mobility (TM) and PM management to that of TM management, is derived, and the effect of PM management is analyzed from the aspects of update or query cost, signaling delivery cost, and processing cost. These results can be utilized in the implementation of PM management in IMT-2000.

Simulation and analysis of Awerbuch–Peleg and GSM schemes for location tracking of mobile users

AbstractMobile users are increasingly demanding full access to networked communications while they are on the move. Several studies have shown that the overhead incurred by the network to keep track of the current location of mobile users is considerably high. The methods currently used for location tracking incur heavy unnecessary costs by requiring that users update locations in their home networks after each move regardless of the distance at which the move occurs, and that all search attempts for a mobile user are first routed to that user's home network. The Awerbuch–Peleg scheme presents a formal model for location tracking which attempts to minimize the cost of local operations—both move and find operations—through the construction of a regional hierarchy. In this paper we present a performance evaluation of the Awerbuch–Peleg scheme. We also compare its performance to that of the GSM‐based location tracking scheme. It is found that the Awerbuch–Peleg scheme in general results in higher costs than the GSM scheme. The reason for this is found to be some unexpected properties of the read and write sets which are key components of the Awerbuch–Peleg scheme. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.