Ontology-Based Automation of Security Guidelines for Smart Homes

The introduction of Internet of Things has attracted increasing number of security risks to the smart home due to the continual exposure of devices to remote network. As a last line of defence, security guidelines are issued to the user to supplement network and manufacturer level risk mitigation efforts. While these guidelines address specific security issues, they are varied and lacking in structure for common representation, understanding and sharing among the smart home community (vendors, developers and household). The smart home user as the executor of these guidelines is faced with additional responsibility that can make the smart home management a daunting task. In this work, an ontology is proposed to represent knowledge about the security guidelines for interoperability and understanding among the smart home actors. Further to this, a context-based ontology is developed, which adapts to changing contextual information like user context and physical context. We highlight different use cases of security guidelines and discuss how the context-based ontology can help the user perform these guidelines automatically.