Access right assignment mechanisms for secure home networks

The proliferation of advanced technologies has been altering our lifestyle and social interactions-the next frontier is the digital home. Although the future of smart homes is promising, many technical challenges must be addressed to achieve convenience and security. In this paper, we delineate the unique combination of security challenges specifically for access control and consider the challenges of how to simply and securely assign access control policies to visitors for home devices and resources. We present a set of intuitive access control policies and suggest four access control settings based on our in-person interview results. Furthermore, we propose the automated Clairvoyant access right assignment (CARA) mechanism that utilizes home owners' social relationship to automatically deduce to which class a visitor belongs. The combination of CARA and the suggested mapping provides a promising first step for home policy assignment such that non-expert home owners can let visitors use their home network with confidence. We anticipate that future research can build on our proposed mechanisms to provide confidence to non-expert home owners for letting visitors use their home network.