Secure and simplified access to home appliances using Iris recognition

Abstract

Moving towards an ‘always-on’, ‘mobile’ and technology driven lifestyle, people are demanding greater technical triumph to make life more exciting, convenient and trouble-free. Automation at home has already started catering to this growing need. Another major motivating factor for this is the prospect of higher energy efficiency, greater control on home from remote locations and the decreasing cost of network-controlled home appliances. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for accessing home appliances over the Internet using secure communication channel offered by Secure Socket Layer (SSL) with mandatory certificate verification, perform user authentication using Iris image, and then hash the biometric data to provide an impregnable three-factor security to the biometric data as well as user instructions while in transit between the user terminal and the home appliance. Additionally, we propose the use of a single Authentication Server for multiple residences, that would store users' sensitive biometric data, perform authentication, access control and quality of service, thereby reducing cost, effort, user dependability and improve security, acceptability and user-friendliness of home automation universally, together with SIP and UPnP protocols. The proposed approach proves to be more effective because of its well integrated three levels of security, less equal error, very small hash code used for authentication, lower computational complexity while matching, and thus, very fast response.