IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2020 - 65

people you work with and socialize with may
overlap, but one is not a subset of the other. If
you have a guest network in your home that is
separate from your primary network, then how
does a guest print on your printer (with your
permission, of course)?
Rather than recognizing the limits of firewalls, the firewall mechanism has been treated
as a necessity and extended by adding complex
rules on each computer and at each point of
interconnection. It becomes very difficult to
make sure each setting on each device is
tweaked just right so applications work. This
works against the goal of simplicity.
A visitor plugging into a network jack,
bypasses all the mechanisms, and has full
access to internal systems. You might trust the
visitor, but you cannot know if the visitor's
computer has been compromised. Even trusted
employees might have their computers compromised when they visit other networks. Notice I
used the word "compromised" rather than
"infested with a virus" to avoid too much
semantic overloading since so much of this
approach is based on simplistic analogies with
the physical world and ideas like finding safety
in gated communities.
Having all these barriers makes the process
of onboarding very difficult. And that has a
direct effect on product acceptance and the
cost of support. One reason one must authenticate to a Wi-Fi access point is to prevent
untrusted computers from connecting to the
physical network. Without wires, there is no
simple boundary. This means going through a
complex process of finding the appropriate
SSID or using a physical button to establish
access and then repeating this process for each
network. I feel this acutely in my house in
which I have over 200 devices with more than
150 being Wi-Fi (many IP lights). I despair of
ever having to change my SSID. Most users do
not feel the pain now because people are at the
dabbling stage and do not have many devices. I
feel the pain that comes from trying to manage
many devices. This will become an issue for
most users as connected devices become the
norm, and people are not willing to live within
the confines of a single provider, be it Alexa, or
Google Home, or Apple.

March/April 2020

Other protocols such as Bluetooth, Zigbee,
and Z-Wave have a version of this in having to
pair with each device in each place. You rent a
car and must pair your phone and then unpair.

RECONNECTING
There is a major positive in the perimeter
security model. It makes everything simpler.
Websites obtain certificates to assure that if you
type https://rmf.vc, you indeed reach a site with
its name in the certificate. It does not really provide security-just encryption and name verification but calling it security is better marketing.
But, what is the equivalent for devices? And
how does one manage all the relationships? One
can do one-time direct pairings, but that does
not scale well. Or, we can set the password in a
new device, but with my more than 200 devices,
that becomes tiresome. That may seem like a lot
of devices but just look around your house at
each lightbulb, switch, door lock, thermostat,
appliance, speaker, etc. Remember that now,
with Alexa, each speaker is a smart endpoint.
Those will all become intelligent over the next
few years.
So, today we generally punt and use open
protocols for internal devices. It is wonderfully
simple and, for now, works-well enough as long
as you accept some risk that your light bulb may
be compromised. More reason to assure that
your main computer devices require some
authentication.

COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS
The power of the Internet is in its ability to let
us address focus on what we are trying to
accomplish without getting lost in the myriad
details of mechanics of networking. At least in
theory, in practice, users still have to concern
themselves about which network they are connected to. The network is a community of devices and you must choose one and are either a
member or not, there is no nuance.
We need to enable communities that are not
tied to any particular physical network. Devices
and services can be a part of multiple communities. For example, if you can choose to have your
clothes dryer maintained as part of the manufacturer's community of devices as well as your

https://www.rmf.vc

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2020

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