Controlling Security Rules Using Natural Dialogue: an Application to Smart Home Care

Smart home systems have revolutionized the way we interact with our living environment, but the concerns over sensor data privacy and security have become one of the major barriers to their widespread adoption. Despite a considerable research effort in designing secure access control mechanisms, the end users are still reluctant to use those either due to the complexity of the interfaces or because they do not have sufficient skills. For the elderly users the problem gets worse. Making the right security choices is increasingly more difficult for this group of users. To assist the elderly users in defining their access control policies, we design a dialogue-based system which allows to create new security rules or update existing ones in a simple and intelligible way using natural language and familiar terms.