Privacy-aware web services in smart homes

Abstract

Smart homes can assist their inhabitants with mental and physical tasks, and monitor their safety and health. However, the systems that empower such homes use sensitive information that could be misused by external systems resulting in violations of the inhabitants' privacy. In this paper, we introduce a Web services-centric solution to handle privacy concerns. Web services provide the functionalities that allow users remotely interact with the systems empowering the smart homes. In addition the solution uses policies to control how Web services handle privacy concerns and penalize those Web services that do not bind to these policies. Moreover the solution uses trust and reputation to select the most trustworthy Web services. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.