Conciliating remote home network access and MAC-address control

Users are increasingly nomadic and want to access their home network from anywhere. Such remote access might also be granted for family members or friends and controlled by the home network owner on a per device basis. This paper describes an overall sound solution for a layer 2 VPN, providing one-click access to the home network. Layer 2 VPN transports all home network protocols, including multicast, UPnP, Windows shares, thus providing full home network experience to remote users. Our solution addresses several practical and technical is- sues such as MAC address filtering and IP collisions. Our solution enables in particular per-device security policy enforcement while sharing the same access credentials with several remote users. We implemented and tested the solution by extending OpenVPN and a home gateway.