Seamus Moloney

Home media atomizer: remote sharing of home content - without semi-trusted proxies

This paper proposes a solution that allows home hosted content, located on home PCs or UPnP media servers, to be offered to remote clients, for consumption. The system is based on a proxy residing on the home network that exports the multimedia content to a Web syndication feed following the Atom protocol, which is then accessed from compatible remote clients. A prototype of the system was built, with the proxy functionality implemented on a home PC and the remote clients running on mobile phones. Special attention has been paid to the social aspects of content sharing, for allowing the home owner to also invite other external users to remotely access specific, home-based media containers, with very simple and secure device configuration.

Usable Access Control inside Home Networks

WLAN link layer security has been well studied but very little work exists in the area of intuitive access control inside home networks. In this paper we propose an approach that allows fine-grained access control without overburdening users with difficult questions or complicated configuration tasks. The proposed concept originated from a user needs study and user trials, and it builds on the existing WiFi Protected Setup standard.

Security for interactions in pervasive networks: applicability of recommendation systems

Recent growth in the sales of Bluetooth-enabled handsets allows short-lived automated interactions between personal devices to become popular outside the research laboratories. In these new kinds of networks, automated data transfer between devices can now be achieved and there are many use cases, but a missing element is a consistent approach to the problem of risk management in automatic interactions. Access to centralized servers is not feasible, so security management will lie in the hands of end-users. We investigate the features present in these networks that could be used to mitigate risk and present existing research in the areas of ad hoc network security and distributed recommendation systems, discussing their potential for solving these problems.

Simulation of a distributed recommendation system for pervasive networks

New networks based on short-range radio are emerging where mobile devices interact in a spontaneous and short-lived fashion. Such pervasive networks involve devices approaching and finding each other, interacting to exchange some information or use some shared service, before disconnecting and leaving radio range. As such, they involve lots of potentially risky interactions with strangers. Due to the lack of any infrastructure in these networks, using a distributed recommendation system to improve security is an attractive option. This paper describes a simulation of a simple distributed recommendation system running in such a network. These networks can be modeled as social networks and the simulation builds on an existing algorithm that has been shown to model social networks accurately. The results of the simulation suggest that with a relatively small overhead, the trust information can move effectively in such networks and the system can deliver a substantial decrease in the level of risk these spontaneous interactions involve.

Visitor access management in personal wireless networks

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.

The Home as a Content Provider for Mash-Ups with External Services

Research in the area of the digital / smart home has been shifting from the in-home environment to the extended aspect, where trusted users can remotely access the home hosted content while away. Our work takes this paradigm one step further, studying how the home can become a content provider, by opening service interfaces to 3rd party Internet services, in order to allow creation of data mash-ups. This would enable the composition of richer and more user centric services, while still keeping the family data securely stored at the home, probably one of the last places on the Internet where privacy can be still found. We propose a solution based on open web technologies and architectures, while we also present a prototype implementation of our system.

Towards distributed service provisioning

This paper studies Internet protocols and services which is currently server based and which show good potential to be distributed to client terminals. Server based services require installation, operation and maintenance. A finite upper limit on the number of servers leads to potential performance bottlenecks. There are environments and situations in which server infrastructure is not available. Client-only based services enable terminal manufacturers to deploy new services fast and flexibly to the customers without depending on the operator server infrastructure investments. As research material we use Internet trace statistics, Sourceforge application categories and popularity, available popularity rankings of Internet services and a literature study of distributed services. The methodology employed is to model the network as a single-hop adhoc WLAN network, which has only terminal clients of equal capabilities and which does not have any external connectivity to the public Internet or any other infrastructure network. The services which technically work in this adhoc WLAN environment can also be extended to the public Internet by taking the advantage of peer-to-peer or other overlay networks. The services are evaluated based on their use case, if there are alternative solutions providing the same service, and according to the technical feasibility in mobile devices. For each selected potential distributed service solution the requirements are defined and the related research problem is stated. If a known solution exists, it is described and evaluated. The common building blocks needed for the service distribution are described based on the service solutions of the selected services. Finally, the main gaps on the path towards fully distributed service provisioning are identified.

Ad-hoc Networks Extending Wireless Broadband Coverage and Capacity for Mobile Internet Usage

The number of wireless Internet users is expected to increase rapidly within the next few years resulting in a huge increase in the number of bits transferred between wireless devices and networks. When looking at current mobile networks, they have mainly been designed for optimized delivery of voice calls and not for broadband data. Although mobile networks are evolving, we expect there to be a need for complementary solutions for providing wireless Internet access. Thus we introduce an ad-hoc networking solution using WiFi short range radio technology for extending cellular wireless broadband coverage and capacity into places where it is most urgently needed; densely populated areas and indoors. We further propose connecting the ad-hoc networking solution to the operators total access offering. As a result, wireless users may enjoy an easy to use, good quality, secure and robust service offering when entering the wireless Internet era, and access providers are equipped with tools to utilize complementary access technologies in places where they suit best. Operators arc able to make efficient use of their existing investments and open new service concepts and business models with mobile Internet domain use cases evolution. Also end users become an essential part of business ecosystem by providing content, services and access to other users.