A security model for home networks with authority delegation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a security model that deal with the authentication and authorization problems for home networks. First, we examine existing researches for home network security and summarize their shortcomings, such as bottleneck, single point of failure, and inconvenience of configuration. Then, we introduce a new security model making up the previous works' defects. In the proposed model, we classify the services into three groups based on their security sensitivity level, and provide different security mechanism to each security level service to make a difference among the protection levels of each service (i.e. to provide more secure mechanisms to more important services.) In addition to this, we distribute the computational cost for security function to each service device while centralize the policy configuration function to central device by using authority delegation scheme. Finally, we describe how the security and convenience are enforced by using our security model. Proposed security protocols in our model are based on the SPKI/SDSI (Simple Public Key Infrastructure / Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure.) and a lightweight protocol similar to SPKI. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.