An Ontology-Based Approach for Setting Security Policies in Smart Homes

To preserve the security and the integrity of smart home environments, a smart home system should provide end users with mechanisms to define security-based policies on their devices and services without the need to know (and specify) details that strongly depend on the underlying technology. To this end, this paper presents an End-User Development tool that allows users to a) define high-level security policies like "do not record any sound in the living room tonight," b) check and debug high-level security policies against inconsistencies and redundancies, and c) translate high-level security policies into device-specific policies that can be applied at run-time. The tool implements a trigger-action programming paradigm, and it exploits a hybrid formalism based on ontologies and Petri Networks.