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Intel Whitepaper On UPnP
An anonymous reader writes "This article by two developers at Intel provides an introduction and overview to Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a standards-based technology for transparent network device connectivity that allows devices from various vendors to "just work" when plugged into the network, eliminating the administrative hassle typically associated with networking devices and making them programmable entities that can be controlled across the network. Intel has been a strong supporter of UPnP, and has released an open-source SDK for the development of Linux-based UPnP devices, hosted at SourceForge, which has been used in a number of UPnP products that will soon show up on the market."
These systems (Rendezvous, UPnP, etc.) seem to neglect one issue that's important to me personally.
If I plug something in to my network, I want to know exactly what it's doing and what it's not. Unless I tell it otherwise I want it to sit there and do absolutely nothing. Am I missing something here? The last thing I can imagine being useful is for "intelligent" devices to start making decisions about what they think I want them to do.
Meep meep
Intel has done two things wrong with this: 1) Reinventing the wheel. Zeroconf is already there, and open-source too. You'd think that with a "universal" standard, you'd at least want to go with what's already there. 2) Trying to shove on Apple again. This time, it's going to be harder though, because Zeroconf already is supported on many devices and applications, including the TiVo. Another reason to just use Zeroconf.
Considering the source: M$FT/intel... how likely is it to be a patent/royalty-free "open" standard? Who's on the technical committee? I love it when win/tel secretly develop a standard in a black-box environment, then get ISO/IEEE to rubber-stamp it. You get good things like DDE/DDX, OLE, OLE2, ATL, COM, ActiveX, and VBS. Well, I guess Sun is guilty for that too, w/ Java.
"All your desktop are belong to Gate$."
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
This is a pretty "new" technology. There is not that many resources/ user group about it. ...?
I have a Microsoft wireless router (MN-500) and it supports UPNP.
I started looking into it and it looks like there are a few cool COM objects that can be used in conjunctions with Advanced XML namespaces to do intersting things programatically.
I wonder what kind of security they put into it
One of the feature/use of UPNP is to traverse and handle NAT properly.
The thing that really bug me, is that they keep adding MMSG ports ( I guess they are from MSN messenger) to my static list of redirected ports.
Geez, stick with one, don't take 10/20 of my port redirections.
All I need is for one of those ports to become easily exploitable and I'm toast !
I can see why it's nice:
MY Webcam/ VOIP/ Remote Assistance, all of the features of MSN Messenger on XP (some avail on other versions) just work.
I still would like to keep it to a few static, non changing ports.
Anybody else experienced that kind of behavior ?