Security and Authentication Issues of an Embedded System Designed and Implemented for Interactive Internet Users

Though embedded applications were originally built on standalone devices, nowadays these devices require a growing integration with other systems through their interconnection with TCP/IP networks. Web Services, which provide a service oriented distributed architecture for the interconnection of systems through TCP/IP networks, have been widely adopted for the integration of business applications, but this sort of integration is still not widely provided by embedded applications. The present work aims to demonstrate the feasibility of using Web Services for the integration of embedded applications running on heterogeneous architectures. This is achieved through the provision of a support for the development and deployment of web services for embedded applications. Basic objective of the system developed is to monitor and control Humidity and Temperature through Internet using interactive computer front end. The feasibility of this approach in terms of security and authentications of its Internet users is demonstrated by developing an mail server along with application deployed. Mail server keeps track of authorised users’ with login password and email ID in a database table. This information is used to identify authorised users who are allowed to make changes in control parameters of the stated embedded application.