Securing inter-cluster communication in Personal Networks

A Personal Network (PN) is a new type of an overlay network consisting of all personal devices belonging to a user, be they remote or local. Such continuous and seamless connectivity of all personal devices belonging to a user enables the development of new applications and improved services. A Personal Network is an intelligent and user-centric network that assists the user in an unobtrusive way. In this paper we investigate means of securing communication between geographically distributed Personal Network clusters. Clusters are ad-hoc networks of co-located personal devices. Using Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology enables the creation of secure tunnels between gateways of different clusters, making it possible to transfer all types of intra-cluster traffic securely, over the insecure public network. The ad-hoc nature of clusters when coupled with the mobile and resource constrained nature of many personal devices makes enforcing security a challenging task. We investigate the suitability of existing VPN technologies to secure inter-cluster communication. Our contribution is in identifying aspects of existing solutions that render them unsuitable in their current form for constrained personal devices. We propose a modified framework based on IPSec and KINK that better satisfies the requirements of personal devices by reducing the cost of security.