Sec-home: a Security-enhanced Framework for Smart Home Environments

Research on smart environments, such as smart homes and smart offices, have recently received increasing attention. In addition to the design and functionality of those devices, current research also focuses on usability and security (privacy). This paper describes a framework for smart homes, called Sec-Home, that supports flexibility, different communication media, as well as simple means to ensure enhanced privacy. The first prototypical implementations indicate that for the chosen application types, the usage of asymmetric cryptography, e.g., public/private key pairs and digital signatures, is very suitable, since their computational demands are negligible; this is a bit contradictory to common sense in that symmetric encryption should be used because of the huge differences in the required computational footprints.