The use of electronics connected to local networks and the Internet is growingall the time. Nowadays you can control your electronics in your house even when away from home, which opens up for potential security threats. The purpose of this report is to point out the potential risks with connecting home electronics to the Internet and to shed light on what security mechanisms that are needed in these kinds of systems. This report contains a theoretical part in which relevant material has been summarized. This material includes the smart home solution Tellstick Net and the wireless technologies ZigBee and Z-Wave, which are commonly used in home automation. The Tellstick Net system was mapped out and a risk analysis with attack trees was performed. After the analysis of the system, the implementation of two potential security threats were attempted. The two attempted attacks were replay attack and cross-site request forgery. The replay attack was unsuccessful due to the way the system communicates and keeps connections alive. However, the cross-site request forgery was discovered to be successful in some cases. It depended on if the browser of the target supported cross-origin resource sharing, as that property protects against cross-site request forgery. Finally, the report discusses what impact the found security deficiencies have, what they entail and how they reflect on the need for security in smart technologies for the home.

The purpose of this research is to discover if home builders along the Wasatch Front in Utah are advertising smart home technologies. Research was conducted by a review of the display advertisements placed in the Saturday and Sunday editions of The Deseret Morning News/Salt Lake Tribune from March 4, 2006 through April 1, 2006. An internet search for smart home terminology was performed on the web sites of home builders advertising in The Deseret Morning News/Salt Lake Tribune. A review of the display advertisements for the Deseret Morning News/Salt Lake Tribune revealed that home builders are not using that medium of advertising for smart home technology. A review of the usage of smart home terminology on the home builders' websites showed similar results. Although there was some usage of smart home terminologies on the websites, the vast majority were found on only two of the home builders' websites.

Homes are a much discussed, but little empirically examined resource for action. Material stuff at home offer resources for social, organisational and individual activities that we routinely encounter and use on an everyday basis. Yet their purposes, storing and sharing practices of use and roles in social and organisational actions are hardly touched upon within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) academic literature. As a consequence of this, there are critical gaps in understanding home organisation and management methods as a means of informing the design of novel technologies. This thesis is an examination of everyday routines in home, paying particular attention to tidying, storing, retrieving and sharing practices. To examine these practices at home, this thesis presents a combination of two qualitative studies using ethnographically oriented methods. Study one (Home’s Tidying up, Storing and Retrieving) concerns the topic of home storage in practice; investigating how householders create and use domestic storage practices and the methods used to manage their storage at home. Study two (Social Interaction around Shared Resources) concerns social interaction around shared resources, and the methods used to manage sharing practices at home. Semi-structured interviews, fieldwork observation, tour around a home, and a photo diary were undertaken to produce a ‘rich’ description of how householders collaborate in storing and sharing set of practices to manage their everyday routines. Several key finding emerged from the research, that are used to identify important implications for design of home organisational technologies, for example to support effective lightweight interactions, providing user controlled mechanism to make different levels of privacy protection for family members, offering effective awareness of family communications and notifications of the activities of other people around these organisation systems, and making available a range of flexible options for family members to access a shared resource. The thesis make the case that flexible systems should be designed allowing people to categorise things in different ways, and have the values of home asserted in technologies, considering factors such as emotion around the use of space in home organisation to make homes become the unique places that they are understood to be.