A Secure Approach to Distributed Internet-Enabled Metrology

This paper aims to explore ways of securely operating electrical instruments via the Internet. A system is presented, which allows a person connected to a local area network (LAN) to operate multiple electrical instruments located at other LANs via a public Web server on the Internet, regardless of firewalls, proxy servers, or source network address translators that separate them. A full system test has been performed, and data from the test are later presented. The solution is based on Microsoft .NET Remoting, which is part of the Microsoft .NET Framework. A viable application is Internet-enabled calibration, and possible users are national measurement institutes and calibration laboratories. The solution is general and does not depend on the underlying network connections involved as long as hypertext transfer protocol over secure sockets layer is supported.