Researcher(s): Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Cranor, Greg Ganger, Adrian Perrig

Research Area: Secure Home Computing

Abstract

The home is going digital. Home computing environments are already quite sophisticated and growing more so very rapidly. We expect future homes to have the following functionality and characteristics: (1) network connectivity of most devices that use electricity; (2) storage capacity embedded in many home and personal devices; (3) remote (across the Internet) control of all computing devices; (4) many different kinds of users will frequently access the home network.

Within this context, the central goal of this project is to design basic security principles and mechanisms to build a trustworthy digital home environment that will be secure even for non-expert users. To this effect, we will provide end users with with automatic or intuitive mechanisms to securely configure their security policies and system designers with powerful tools for building enforcement mechanisms that require coordination of multiple devices in the home. The technologies that we will focus on to develop these mechanisms are automatic policy management, semantic data organization for enabling policies, and expandable grid interfaces for policy management.