Enabling user authentication and authorization to support context-aware UPnP applications
Thiago Sales, Leandro Melo de Sales, Hyggo Oliveira de Almeida, Ângelo Perkusich · 2009
The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) standard provides a flexible and transparent way of connecting consumer electronics, intelligent appliances and mobile devices from many different vendors. Nowadays, the UPnP standard is getting popular due to its robust way of connectivity and the massive number of developed applications. Although providing a sophisticated solution for discovering, the UPnP standard does not provide user authentication and authorization mechanisms, which are required to support context-aware UPnP applications. As a result, UPnP control points and UPnP devices cannot communicate with each other by providing user and context sensitive information due to the absence of such mechanisms in the current UPnP standard. As a consequence, this paper proposes an extension of the UPnP standard named UPnP-UP, which allows user authentication and authorization mechanisms for UPnP devices and applications, as well as it maintains backward compatibility with previous versions of the UPnP standard.