Federated homes: Secure sharing of home services

This paper presents an architecture which allows consumers to securely share the services available in their home networks with remote third parties. It is implemented as a software service which can be installed on a home-gateway device. The implementation supports dynamic sharing of UPnP-compliant devices and multimedia content and enables complex service compositions across federated homes through a secure Federal Relationship Manager (FRM) service. We have extended UPnP to use XMPP as the underlying messaging protocol to maintain up-to-date state information about the availability of devices and content to federated third parties. The architecture, implementation and performance evaluations are described, demonstrating the potential for this technology to provide consumers with a mechanism for federating home services. This mechanism is sufficiently powerful to satisfy fine-grained sharing constraints through a user interface that is sufficiently simple for average consumers to master.