This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Digital data (e.g., photos, videos) are increasingly produced and managed on mobiles devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops). This data is also often shared, backed up, or processed via Internet. Indeed, a wide range of “cloud” services handle users' content, be they photo processing services, social networks or online storage. Most of these cloud services rely entirely on web technologies. As a consequence, users need to upload large amounts of content over HTTP to web applications. However, the speed of uploads is limited by the available bandwidth. Indeed, the connectivity speed to the
Internet remains limited due to the use of legacy infrastructures (xDSL), or of shared medium (Cellular).
The long upload times prevent users from standing by or powering off their stand-alone devices and require these users to keep their devices connected to handle the transfer over the Internet. In order to alleviate these issues, a mechanism to offload uploads over HTTP to a third party device which is permanently connected to the network, such as residential gateway, is proposed. A method for locating the third party device offering the offloading web service is therefore proposed.
However, offloading a task to a third party requires to trust this third party, in other words the third party device hosting the offload service has to be authenticated by the user stand/alone device. Known solution for authenticating a device or a web service are based on certification by a trust authority. Certificates are either delivered by a trust authority to a trusted operator owning the web service or to user's physical device. However, these solutions are not compatible with the legacy software, such as web browser, and standard web protocols wherein the processing environment is limited. In others words, the browser is limited in term of inputs and outputs, for instance the browser cannot access to the storage media (such as hard disk drive) of the device on which it is executed, cannot access directly to the network.
A solution for securely accessing a web service by a browser running a web application on a user device through a network, wherein the web service is hosted by a local device is therefore required. The method should deliberately be simple to ease implementation and use, and compatible with legacy software, adapted to be implemented in JavaScript and to run in the browser.
The present invention provides such a solution.