A Proxy Agent for Small Network-Enabled Devices

Network-enabled devices use standard Internet TCP/IP protocols and security protocols to communicate with other network nodes. They can provide services and access resources over the Internet. Small network-enabled devices may not have hardware for direct network connections. In this case, they connect to the Internet via host computers, which provide routing, remote access, and network address translation (NAT). However, organizations´ security policies often prevent users from enabling these services. This paper presents a proxy agent to support network-enabled devices while respecting the security policies. The proxy agent uses the web proxy tunneling with added security features. Although proxy tunneling is well defined for web proxy servers, we must resolve several security and deployment related issues in order to adopt it securely for network-enabled devices. The paper describes the application of proxy tunneling and security methods built around this service to solve the routing related problems.