OpenHouse: A Secure Platform for Distributed Home Services

Abstract

A large amount of versatile services are emerging as home networks and devices are opened for different manufacturers and service developers. With this complexity comes a need to make these services more personalized and secure. However, at the same time, the home network should be easy to manage for non-expert users. In this paper, we propose OpenHouse, a TLS based distributed security architecture for use in home networks. We have adopted a fine-grained role and domain based authorization model and studied how the configuration burden for end users can be minimized by classifying services in a security relevant manner and providing homes with default security policies. We evaluated the feasibility of the proposal by implementing a secured UPnP based platform on Nokia N800 Internet tablet and Gumstix low-end Linux devices. We report the implications the approach has for developers and for end user experience as well as the challenges it still faces.