Secure Web-Based Communication Framework For Smart Home Systems Designed For The Elderly And Disabled

As a result of the increasing awareness about common daily problems of the elderly and disabled in recent years, novel technology solutions have been designed and developed. Thanks to smart homes which involve a set of various sensors and devices to make the daily lives of the elderly and disabled easier and provide remote monitoring ability to the family members, nowadays the elderly and disabled stay in their houses instead of assisted-living centres. On the other hand, elderly and disabled people living alone may be exposed to potential security threats. In this study, a framework is proposed in order to achieve secure communication over the Internet. In the proposed framework, information to be transferred is first encrypted using RSA algorithm and then sent to the recipient. For security reasons, after the recipient reads the encrypted information, traces of the communication should be removed. For this objective, before the transfer, the sender determines how many seconds the message will be available to the recipient via a link. When the recipient receives the link, he/she can open the message with the secret key. After the predefined time, the message is deleted from the database used by the framework. The framework can be used to enable confidential messaging between smart home inhabitants and people they would like to communicate. The framework can easily be integrated into smart home control panels or web-based interfaces of smart home systems.