Secure remote access from office to home

When accessing IP-ready appliances at home from a remote site, security is a major concern. We address the seemingly common scenario of accessing IP-ready appliances behind a home firewall from a remote PC within a corporate intranet. The scenario reveals the complex nature of secure remote access. Various IP tunneling technologies can provide secure remote access without sacrificing the ubiquitous accessibility of the Internet; however, the problem of multiple authentication processes is evident in the framework. Digital certificate technology can simplify the authentication process required to establish multiple IP tunnels. However, IP tunneling technologies do not scale well, and become infeasible if the number of firewalls to traverse increases. Scalability and end-to-end security requirements call for the deployment of authenticated firewall traversal methods that use minimal or no IP tunnels. This article describes a meet-in-the-middle network model as a simple and practical method.