On December 10, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the AllSeen Alliance, an industry consortium that seeks to expand the Internet of Things in home and industry. Premier members include: Haier, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, Silicon Image and TP-LINK, with more than a dozen additional community member companies.
The members plan to adopt an open-source peer-to-peer communications framework called AllJoyn, originally developed by Qualcomm Innovation Center and launched back in 2011. Qualcomm has now contributed AllJoyn to the Alliance. AllJoyn is hardware agnostic and can run on multiple popular OSs including Linux, Android, iOS, and various Windows desktop and embedded versions (despite the Alliance being announced by the Linux Foundation). You can find technical details of AllJoyn at www.alljoyn.org, so we won’t describe the protocol at length here.
AllJoyn enables devices to interact at the app-to-app level. The protocol handles much of the communication over ad hoc proximity networks, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, with the ability to mix and match devices with different communications protocols, so that apps don’t have to deal with the lower level functions. Qualcomm’s early emphasis was to enable multi-player gaming across a variety of unlike devices, but the AllSeen Alliance seeks to foster adoption across a much broader range of devices in “the Internet of Everything.”
AllJoyn facilitates authentication and encrypted data transactions between devices. But how will AllJoyn prevent unintended devices from joining a group of devices given that the protocol was designed to make device discovery and connectivity as easy as possible?
In the case of Wi-Fi, assuming that the network is set up with proper Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), AllJoyn doesn’t make it any easier to gain access to the network without the security key, particularly if the network is set up to allow only whitelisted devices. For Bluetooth, a hacker within range (about 10 meters) conceivably could spoof the identity of a known device, to trick a user into accepting it into the network. In conventional Bluetooth communications, once devices are paired and connected, they could have free reign over numerous applications on each other. With AllJoyn, the protocol can be used to limit which apps can talk to each other on which device. In that sense, AllJoyn should actually increase the security of Bluetooth devices. When combined with encrypted communications, no security holes are obvious (although it’s best to assume that hackers will discover some).
In addition, AllJoyn devices are able to communicate with each other in the absence of any Internet connection, which in certain scenarios will eliminate entire realms of security risk.
VDC expects that the AllSeen Alliance will succeed in gaining acceptance of AllJoyn for consumer electronics and home control applications. But the very names AllSeen and AllJoyn imply a degree of openness that won’t inspire confidence among industrial and critical infrastructure users. The convenience advantages of AllJoyn probably won’t outweigh security concerns for those users.