Home Network Security

Short Description
Home computers that are connected to the Internet are under attack and need to be secured. That process is relatively well understood, even though we do not have perfect solutions today and probably never will. Meanwhile, however, the home computing environment is evolving into a home network of multiple devices, which will also need to be secured. We have little experience with these new home networks and much research needs to be done in this area. This paper gives a view of the requirements and some of the techniques available for securing home networks.

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Content
First, there was a single Personal Computer (PC) in a few homes with no connection to the outside world. Now, we have computers in most homes and most have Internet connections to the outside world. The next step, already happening, is not one computer but rather a large network of devices in a home. Some of these are mobile devices, which will be brought into the home by guests, friends, hired employees, maintenance personnel employed by service providers, and other strangers.
As these changes happen, the security needs of the home user also change. In the days of the disconnected single PC, the primary security threat was from virus contamination on floppy disks. With continuous connectivity to the Internet, many new attack channels have been opened (e-mail attachments, executable code or scripts fetched from Web pages, active penetrations at lower networking levels, etc.), while floppies have all but disappeared, closing that older channel. To the extent that these existing threats are understood, there are products available to help home users defend themselves against them.
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SECURING THE EXISTING HOME NET
Any home computer connected to the Internet is in danger of being attacked. A broadband connection leads to probes preparatory to an attack every few minutes. A dial-up connection, behind the firewall of an Internet Service Provider (ISP), leads to attacks from machines that are behind the same firewall. In the author’s experience with one ISP, probes came once or twice a week.
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