A Secure Event Logging System for Smart Homes

Abstract

Smart homes include hundreds of devices that generate messages, and communicate with each other and the world outside the home, to provide a highly functional, optimized and personalized environment for residents. A secure and reliable event logging system is an essential component of smart homes with a wide range of applications such as fault detection, forensics and accounting. Existing smart home IoT frameworks are cloud-based and privacy of fine-grained log data is a real concern. In this paper we propose a host-based conceptual framework for storing and processing data in smart homes, analyze security requirements of such environments and design a forward secure event logging system that satisfies these environments. We give an overview of our implementation of a message (event) logging system for a typical home, and present efficiency evaluation of our cryptographic design.