Circles of trust: A voice-based authorization scheme for securing IOT smart homes

Have you ever sat in wonder at the amount of computing devices available in the average home today? We have come to live in a world saturated with many computing devices and with there being so many types of devices, it is unsurprising that they have made their way into the function of our homes. The Internet of Things (IoT) that comprise our home networks are making our lives more convenient, but a question to be raised is: Are our devices secure and only able to be used by those we trust? For example, you would like your spouse to have access to the front door, but it would be considered risky for your children to have the same access. In this research project, we delve into the security of IoT devices to see whether access to such devices can be mediated based on trust. Our idea is called circles of trust: we organize those we trust into several circles around a main user and access to devices is based on their relationship or level of trust to such user, for instance, those more trusted by the user will have access to more devices on the home network. The level of access flows from inside out with the main user having access to everything while someone in the circle outside the user would have access to their circle and every circle outside theirs. We hope to achieve this idea through a voice recognition system based on a simple and intuitive mental model that can be easily handled by non-experts with little training. We are now in the development process attempting to implement the infrastructure necessary for the voice recognition. Later, we will carry out a user study in which we plan to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.