Usability vs Privacy in the Smart Home

Do you own a smart home device like a voice assistant, smart doorbell or thermostat? Do you share these devices or do other people have physical access to them? Have you been concerned about your data being accessed by others?

In a paper titled Optimistic Access Control for the Smart Home we explored the idea of having a security scheme that facilitates the setup and sharing of smart home devices.

What is our motivation? Commonly, it takes people a while to set up their smart home devices as they have to create accounts for different users and assign permissions. In other cases, people decide to share one account for all users, which is not ideal from a security point of view.

At a high level, “optimistic” access control can be summarized with the following motto: “ask for forgiveness, not permission”.

In this collaboration with Nathan Malkin, Alan F. Luo, and Michelle L. Mazurek we conducted a series of online surveys to study what people think of an “optimistic” access control scheme for smart home devices.

Are you curious to know more about how this scheme works? Do you want to learn about how we evaluated the acceptability of this idea? Are you interested in learning which specific smart home devices people think might benefit from having an “optimistic” access control scheme?

I invite you to read our paper.