Monitoring home network traffic via programmable routers

The rapid spread of residential broadband connections and Internet-capable consumer devices in home networks has changed the landscape of Internet traffic. To gain a deep understanding of Internet traffic for home networks, this paper develops a traffic monitoring platform that collects and analyzes home network traffic via programmable home routers and traffic profiling servers. Using traffic data captured from real home networks, we present traffic characteristics in home networks, and then apply principal component analysis to uncover temporal correlations among application ports. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study to characterize network traffic of Internet-capable devices from inside home networks.

The rapid growth of broadband connections and home networks has created new application opportunities such as video streaming and remote health care. However, managing and securing the increasingly complicated home networks has remained a serious challenge for most home users who have little technical expertise to manage their home networks and connected devices. Towards this end, we will demonstrate HomeTPS, a traffic profiling system for home networks that collects, analyzes and makes sense of home network traffic. The demonstration will show automatic traffic collection from programmable home routers, informative traffic summary reports and behavior profiles for Internet-capable home devices, and real-time discovery of anomalous traffic from Internet attackers or from compromised devices in home networks.

Journal Article Home Network Device Authentication: Device Authentication Framework and Device Certificate Profile Get access Yun-Kyung Lee, Yun-Kyung Lee * 1Information Security Division, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, 161 Gajeong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea *Corresponding author: neohappy@etri.re.kr Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Deok Gyu Lee, Deok Gyu Lee 1Information Security Division, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, 161 Gajeong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jong-Wook Han, Jong-Wook Han 1Information Security Division, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, 161 Gajeong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Tai-Hoon Kim Tai-Hoon Kim 2Hannam University, Daejeon, Republic of Korea Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Computer Journal, Volume 52, Issue 8, November 2009, Pages 871–877, https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxn038 Published: 24 July 2008 Article history Received: 31 January 2008 Revision received: 06 June 2008 Published: 24 July 2008

The rapid spread of residential broadband connections and Internet-capable consumer devices in home networks has changed the landscape of Internet traffic. To gain a deep understanding of Internet traffic for home networks, this paper develops a traffic monitoring platform that collects and analyzes home network traffic via programmable home routers and traffic profiling servers. Using traffic data captured from real home networks, we present traffic characteristics in home networks and then apply principal component analysis to uncover temporal correlations among application ports. In light of prevalent unwanted traffic on the Internet, we characterize the intensity, sources, and port diversity of unwanted traffic toward home networks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study to characterize network traffic of Internet-capable devices from inside home network.

Advances in electronics and connectivity have enabled a wide range of applications that can harness data collection for better decision making and an improved lifestyle. The Internet of Things (IoT) provides the communication infrastructure that allows devices with sensing and control capabilities to be connected within a home network. Smart home systems are considered one of the prominent applications in IoT, where it is possible to control home devices to achieve a better usage in terms of cost and comfort. However, smart home networks contain a wide range of devices and finding an optimal schedule for their working hours is an NP-hard problem. Hence, rather than using mathematical optimization to find optimal solutions, this paper proposes a modeling and simulation methods in order to provide good decisions and recommendations for devices’ scheduling. Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) formalism is used to develop a model of a smart home network. The devices are categorized into two groups: monitoring devices and control devices. Monitoring devices include sensors that capture climate, energy, power, performance, and occupant’s behavioral data. Control devices send signals remotely for setting and controlling different devices in the smart home network. The behavior in terms of power usage and cost is simulated under different scenarios and settings. The simulation results show that less energy consumption can be achieved if users adopt a behavior where the schedule of three devices is changed every week. As a result, the proposed method can be utilized to make better decisions in setting devices parameters and evaluating the performance of the smart devices network under different conditions, scenarios, and settings.

Purpose As home users are increasingly responsible for securing their computing devices and home networks, there is a growing need to develop interventions to assist them in protecting their home networking devices, which are vulnerable to attack. To this end, this paper aims to examine the motivating factors that drive South African fibre users to protect their home networking devices. Design/methodology/approach Using the protection motivation theory as the primary framework, a measurement instrument comprising 53 questionnaire items was developed to measure 13 constructs. The study collected empirical data from a sample of 392 South African home fibre users and evaluated the research model using structural equation modelling. Findings The evaluation showed a good fit, with 12 out of 15 predicted hypotheses being accepted for the final research model, contributing to the understanding of the factors that motivate home users to protect their home networking devices. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to model the factors that drive South African home fibre users to protect their home networking devices. Knowing these factors could help home internet service providers and security software vendors of home products to develop security interventions that could assist home fibre users to secure their home networking devices.

Wireless sensor networks have become an essential part of home and building automation, especially for energy management and health monitoring. This paper presents a Distributed Operating System (DOS) based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to manage all embedded devices in a home network at high level of interoperability. This system can solve many problems related to accessing home network from Internet and future networks like Smart Grids. The proposed system takes into consideration the limited resources of sensors as well as the matters of simultaneous multi-access, eventing, authorization, security and scheduling the on-line time of sensors in order to reduce power consumption. The paper shows the advantages of using some features of our SOA distributed operating system, like using a queue with a dispatcher to dispatch the simultaneous web requests and also using cache and scheduling, in addition to using a requester to enable accessing embedded devices with different networking protocols. These features help in increasing the quality of services and reaching high level of reliability.

Home Network-Attached Storage (NAS) provides an easy way for data sharing and backup among multiple consumer electronic devices in home networks. Because of large capacity and cost effectiveness, disks are widely adopted in home NAS devices. In addition, data writes are common for many home NAS devices since these devices are usually used for data storage and backup. A writeback policy selects which dirty buffers are to be flushed to the disk, which is critical to the system performance under write-intensive workloads. In this paper, an intelligent writeback policy for home NAS called TESA is proposed. In contrast to most existing writeback policies, TESA considers both temporal and spatial information of the dirty buffers to improve the writeback performance. Considering the temporal information helps to reduce the frequency of writing back recently used dirty buffers, and hence leads to reduced write traffic. Considering the spatial information causes a reduction in the overall seek time and rotation delay of the dirty buffer writeback. The TESA writeback policy was implemented on a NAS evaluation board running Linux kernel. The performance results shows that TESA yields a significant performance improvement (i.e., up to 33.1%) over the original writeback policy of Linux. Moreover, TESA outperforms the policy that considers only the temporal information of the dirty buffers by up to 21.0%, and it also has up to 10.9% performance improvement over a previous policy that considers both the temporal and spatial information.

In this paper, we propose an adaptive transformation engine that provides smart devices with optimal user interfaces and media contents to their characteristics so as to conveniently control home networks remotely using smart devices in the wired and wireless home networks which various kinds of smart devices and home network devices are connected. The proposed engine dynamically transforms UI contents and transfers them using device profiles and UI transformation policies to make it suitable for smart devices. Moreover, the proposed engine offers suitable media contents for smart devices through capabilities of real-time media transcoding and streaming considering device and media profiles.

These growing threats and broad damages have made it imperative to understand, characterize, filter, and reduce exploit traffic towards millions of home routers and billions of connected devices in the home. This paper presents a bloom-filter based analytic framework to capture persistent threats towards the same home routers and to identify correlated attacks towards distributed home networks. Our experimental results based on network traffic collected from real homes over 18 months have revealed a number of interesting findings on persistent and correlated threats towards home networks, which calls for improved security and management of home networks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first effort to characterize cyber threats towards home networks and to propose a simple and yet effective approach to identify persistent and aggressive attacks towards home networks.

This article developed a framework for trust management in mobile ambient home network with a view to secure the home devices and channel against attacks. The framework was design using mobile ad hoc network and social networking concept. The trust management, global reputation aggregation which considered the direct and indirect communication of home devices and remote devices was employed to shield home devices from attacks. While real time dynamic source routing protocol was employed to prevent the channel from attacks by selfish and malicious nodes. The prototype of the framework was implemented using C# programming language. The framework will enhance the activities in the home by securing the home network against unforeseen network disruption and node misbehavior due to the distributed nature of the environment.

This study designed, simulated and evaluated the performance of a conceptual framework for ambient ad hoc home network. This was with a view to detecting malicious nodes and securing the home devices against attacks. The proposed framework, called mobile ambient social trust consists of mobile devices and mobile ad hoc network as communication channel. The trust model for the device attacks is Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy (ANF) that considered global reputation of the direct and indirect communication of home devices and remote devices. The model was simulated using Matlab 7.0. In the simulation, NSL-KDD dataset was used as input packets, the artificial neural network for packet classification and ANF system for the global trust computation. The proposed model was benchmarked with an existing Eigen Trust (ET) model using detection accuracy and convergence time as performance metrics. The simulation results using the above parameters revealed a better performance of the ANF over ET model. The framework will secure the home network against unforeseen network disruption and node misbehavior.

Because of the advanced development in computer technology, home automation system could provide a variety of convenient and novel services to people. But only providing many kinds of services is not enough; instead, upgrading the quality of services is also a very important issue. One way to upgrade the service quality is to customize the service according to the inhabitant's personal situation, and the user location is the key information for the home automation system to customize the services. Another impact of the advanced computer technology is to make the personal digital device to commonly have the capability to communicate through the wireless networks, and the popularity of wireless networks in home has increased in recent years. As a result, home automation system can bring services to personal digital devices held by people through any wireless network, and customize the services according to the location of personal digital device in home. In this paper, we present a location determination system for the home automation system to provide location aware services. This location determination system uses support vector machine to classify the location of a wireless client from its signal strength measures, and we describe its architecture and discuss its performance.

In this paper, the author describes the design and implementation of a LDNA (Digtal Living Network Alliance) Framework for Handheld devices. DLNA has developed guidelines for interoperability among home devices enabling a multitude of usage scenarios for sharing digital content such as A V (Audio Visual), Photo, and Audio. The proposed DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) Client Framework handles multiple services like Video and multimedia services in Smart Home networks simultaneously. With this new DLNA framework, the home users can choose various services dynamically and use them with out any complicated pre-configuration with the Home IMS gateway (HIGA). The framework provides smooth data transfer switching in home network between Cellular and Wi-fi/Bluetooth networks to enhance mobility based on user/application preferences. The DLNA Framework also provides QoS measurement and monitoring functionality for multimedia services, which enables users to benefit from high throughput and maintains session continuity during selection of different access networks. Apart from these features, the DLNA Framework provides access to device access protocols like UPnP to facilitate the management of home devices.

This paper proposes a novel object-based home network middleware for the interoperability among home devices and smart grid devices. This middleware can be adopted by home devices for energy efficient homes.