Securing Communications in the Smart Home

As the vision of ubiquitous computing becomes reality smart devices are embedded into our surroundings and domestic appliances providing services transparently. The nature of such smart computing environments is open and dynamic; therefore the use of predefined security associations between all of the participating devices is particularly difficult. Our proposal, called ÆTHER, defines a security management architecture designed specifically to address access control and the establishment of associations in smart environments. Attribute authority sets and access control policy entries are embedded into pervasive devices defining initial trust relationships. Members of the attribute authority sets are trusted to issue credentials for the corresponding attributes that can then be used to gain access to services provided by smart devices. We allow these sets to grow dynamically without requiring manual reconfiguration facilitating decentralized administration, which is required in volatile pervasive environments, and attribute mapping to allow roaming among smart authority domains.