On secured end-to-end appliance control using SIP

Abstract

With the advent of home networks and the proliferation of broadband connectivity to homes, there is an increasing demand for a secure end-to-end protocol to remotely control home appliances from remote sites on the other side of the Internet. Recently session initiation protocol (SIP) with some extensions has been proposed as a candidate protocol for delivering control commands to home appliances. We discuss issues related to secure remote appliance control and evaluate SIP as a candidate solution. At the end we propose some extensions to SIP to make it more suitable for appliance control. In particular, we discuss two different security associations that can be established between the user and the controlled appliances. We also argue that mutual authentication, which allows communicating parties to verify each other's identity, is an important requirement for remote appliance control, and show how it can be achieved by using SIP. Finally, we describe how appliances can be controlled using the existing SIP message method.