My job title is "Technical Leader" in the Cisco Systems Research and Advanced Development group.   I focus on home networking and wear this hat in the Linksys Architecture Group, the Cisco Media & Entertainment Board, and with product groups in my company. Most of my work cannot be publicly shared.   My public roles, however, include "vice chair" of the UPnP Internet Gateway Device Working Committee. Part of my work in UPnP is the re-write of the UPnP Device Architecture for IPv6 (UDA IPv6).

I also work on UPnP security. The Security link in the left frame is a short paper I wrote last year about attacks on UPnP and on home network security in general. The UPnP IGD:2 link points to current UPnP efforts to mitigate these attacks using access controls.

Most attempts to put effective access controls on home network products are not very successful. This is due in part to the mismatch between user needs, expectations and understanding of home networks. Last year, I championed an ethnograpic research study with PARC and Linksys that studied early adopters of new home-network technologies. We studied a small group of people about their security expectations and practices, among other topics. The Ethnography link in the left frame is a work in progress on this effort.

Secure or not, home networks are increasingly used for home media. I represent Cisco in the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE LLC), a consortium of companies that is developing a network replacement for DVD movies. Much of what is written about DECE LLC in the trade press is wrong, and little is publicly available from DECE at present. Mitch Singer of Sony Pictures chairs DECE LLC, however, and the Open Market link points to a presentation by Mitch on what has grown into the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. An important part of the home media ecosystem of the future, I predict, will use Adaptive Streaming of media from a standard Fragmented MP4 container. The MP4 will settle on a single encryption type (common MPEG-4 Scheme Box) for all video applications, and it will feature a method to easily add licenses for multiple DRM systems. This page will be updated with these topics in the future.