Self-authorized Public Key Management for Home Networks

This paper describes the key management method which allows secure communication channels between devices in home networks. Home network technologies have developed to enable various kinds of home devices to access the digital information between the devices. Without security framework, however, the digital information including a user’s private data may be exposed to a malicious attacker. Although conventional public key cryptosystems generally provide security features such as confidentiality and integrity, the distribution of the keys is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack without a trusted third party. In general home networks are dynamically set up without relying on any pre-existing infrastructure or central administration. Therefore, we must implement key distribution schemes without the assumption of a trusted third party. In this paper, we present self-authorized public key management for home networks. Our idea is to bind the device owner’s authorization information to the public key of a device. Our protocol enables the distribution of the authenticated public key using an identity-based encryption scheme. We also provide heuristic analysis of various security properties.