Framework for intuitive user interaction with security in the smart home

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-104).This thesis presents IntuiSec, a framework for intuitive user interaction with Smart Home security. The design approach of IntuiSec is to introduce a layer of indirection between user-level intent and the system-level security infrastructure. This layer is implemented by a collection of distributed middleware and user-level tools. It encapsulates system-level security events and exposes only concepts and real-world metaphors that are intuitive to non-expert users. It also translates user intent to the appropriate system-level security actions. The IntuiSec framework presents the user with intuitive steps for setting up a secure home network, establishing trusted relationships between devices, and granting temporal, selective access for both home occupants and visitors to devices within the home. The middleware exposes APIs that allow other applications to present the user with meaningful visualizations of security-related parameters and concepts. I present the IntuiSec system design and an example proof-of-concept implementation, which demonstrates the user experience and provides more insight into the framework.by Saad Safer Shakhshir.M.Eng

An Ontology Based Approach Towards A Universal Description Framework for Home Networks

Current home networks typically involve two or more machines sharing network resources. The vision for the home network has grown from a simple computer network, to every day appliances embedded with network capabilities. In this environment devices and services within the home can interoperate, regardless of protocol or platform. Network clients can discover required resources by performing network discovery over component descriptions. Common approaches to this discovery process involve simple matching of keywords or attribute/value pairings. Interest emerging from the Semantic Web community has led to ontology languages being applied to network domains, providing a logical and semantically rich approach to both describing and discovering network components. In much of the existing work within this domain, developers have focused on defining new description frameworks in isolation from existing protocol frameworks and vocabularies. This work proposes an ontology-based description framework which takes the ontology approach to the next step, where existing description frameworks are in- corporated into the ontology-based framework, allowing discovery mechanisms to cover multiple existing domains. In this manner, existing protocols and networking approaches can participate in semantically-rich discovery processes. This framework also includes a system architecture developed for the purpose of reconciling existing home network solutions with the ontology-based discovery process. This work also describes an implementation of the approach and is deployed within a home-network environment. This implementation involves existing home networking frameworks, protocols and components, allowing the claims of this work to be examined and evaluated from a ‘real-world’ perspective