Visitor access management in personal wireless networks

Abstract

The increasing popularity and variety of consumer multimedia devices is driving the need for networked homes. Yet setting up a secure wireless network is a daunting task for most ordinary users. Recently, there have been several proposals for easing this process. However, none of the proposals consider the problem of how to make it easy to manage visitor access. In this paper, we motivate the requirements for visitor management, show the shortcomings of the current easy setup proposals in this regard, and propose a new setup procedure that makes it easy to manage visitor access to wireless networks. Our contributions are twofold: first we present an approach to assigning categories to client devices at admission time so that selective revocation of clients based on those categories becomes possible. Then we present the idea of admission tickets, a flexible and secure way to delegate conditional access rights. We report the results and experience of prototyping of the proposed procedure using the HostAP framework.