Design and implementation of secure communication channels over UPnP networks

The scale of smart living spaces can be varied from small, e.g. a household, to large, e.g. a building or a campus, scales. As the scale of the space increases, we can expect that the requirements for the two features - zero-configuration and secure data communication channels - are getting more important. The feature of zero-configuration reduces the cost to setup the network and secure data communication channels guarantee both the privacy and confidentiality of possible sensitive data transmitted in the network. In this paper, we integrated two technologies, UPnP and secure group communication techniques, to construct an almost zero-configuration secure environment for smart living spaces. A secure and flexible communication environment is constructed as follows. An UPnP controller is implemented to manage devices in the same administrative domain and hence these devices can be treated as members in the same communication group. Then, by leveraging group key management algorithms, we successfully build both point-to-point and broadcast secure channels over the UPnP network.