Secure and easy-to-use registration of mobile and stationary devices to wireless ad-hoc CE networks

摘要

This paper describes a solution to the problem of registering mobile and stationary devices to a wireless ad-hoc network of consumer electronics (CE) devices in a secure and easy-to-use way. Here, secure means firstly, that the devices to be registered and the networks these devices shall be registered with are the ones that the user specified. Secondly, that no masking or man-in-the-middle attacks are possible. In addition, easy-to-use means that the registration does not require complex user actions like typing in keys, that the probability of an unintended registration is low, and that the registration can take place on every CE device itself, i.e. without the need for additional PDAs or PCs. This is achieved by a) an intuitive user interface where the user identifies devices audio-visually and b) by a protocol that ensures that only one registration instance at a time is executed in some environment.