Biblio

The growth of IoT devices during the last decade has led to the development of smart ecosystems, such as smart homes, prone to cyberattacks. Traditional security methodologies support to some extend the requirement for preserving privacy and security of such deployments, but their centralized nature in conjunction with low computational capabilities of smart home gateways make such approaches not efficient. Last achievements on blockchain technologies allowed the use of such decentralized architectures to support cybersecurity defence mechanisms. In this work, a blockchain framework is presented to support the cybersecurity mechanisms of smart homes installations, focusing on the immutability of users and devices that constitute such environments. The proposed methodology provides also the appropriate smart contracts support for ensuring the integrity of the smart home gateway and IoT devices, as well as the dynamic and immutable management of blocked malicious IPs. The framework has been deployed on a real smart home environment demonstrating its applicability and efficiency.

The H2020 European research project GHOST - Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control - aims to deploy a highly effective security framework for IoT smart home residents through a novel reference architecture for user-centric cyber security in smart homes providing an unobtrusive and user-comprehensible solution. The aforementioned security framework leads to a transparent cyber security environment by increasing the effectiveness of the existing cyber security services and enhancing system's self-defence through disruptive software-enabled network security solutions. In this paper, GHOST security framework for IoT-based smart homes is presented. It is aiming to address the security challenges posed by several types of attacks, such as network, device and software. The effective design of the overall multi-layered architecture is analysed, with particular emphasis given to the integration aspects through dynamic and re-configurable solutions and the features provided by each one of the architectural layers. Additionally, real-life trials and the associated use cases are described showcasing the competences and potential of the proposed framework.