Security, Privacy, and Dependability in Smart Homes: A Pattern Catalog Approach

Security, privacy and dependability are crucial issues if one wants to build a real smart home. First, in addition to established home security requirements, smart home adoption requires to solve brand-new security vulnerabilities deriving from the automated facets of smart homes. Thereafter, pervasive computing and ambient intelligence allow to collect a lot of information, to analyze it to derive new facts, and make them explicit. Finally, systems that are usually safe and dependable can fail when their behavior is becoming controlled as the result of complex interactions between many intertwined information systems. Unfortunately, application developers in smart home environments are usually neither security experts, nor familiar with ethical and legal requirements related to privacy. Security patterns can help to anticipate, overcome, and document systematically these difficult issues in building pervasive information systems in smart homes for cognitively impaired people. In this paper, we illustrate how security patterns can be extended and applied to Smart Home to foster autonomy of elderly or cognitively impaired people, then, we sketch the structure of the catalog which will be populated with a few patterns.