Biblio

With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, home network management and security are becoming complex. There is an urgent requirement to make smart home network management more efficient. This work proposes an SDN-based architecture to secure smart home networks through K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) based device classifications and malicious traffic detection. The efficiency is enhanced by offloading the computation-intensive KNN model to a Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Furthermore, we propose a custom KNN solution that exhibits the best performance on an FPGA compared with four alternative KNN instances (i.e., 78% faster than a parallel Bubble Sort-based implementation and 99% faster than three other sorting algorithms). Moreover, with 36,225 training samples, the proposed KNN solution classifies a test query with 95% accuracy in approximately 4 ms on an FPGA compared to 57 seconds on a CPU platform. This highlights the promise of FPGA-based platforms for edge computing applications in the smart home.

Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are being widely used in smart homes and organizations. An IoT device has some intended purposes, but may also have hidden functionalities. Typically, the device is installed in a home or an organization and the network traffic associated with the device is captured and analyzed to infer high-level functionality to the extent possible. However, such analysis is dynamic in nature, and requires the installation of the device and access to network data which is often hard to get for privacy and confidentiality reasons. We propose an alternative static approach which can infer the functionality of a device from vendor materials using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Information about IoT device functionality can be used in various applications, one of which is ensuring security in a smart home. We demonstrate how security policies associated with device functionality in a smart home can be formally represented using the NIST Next Generation Access Control (NGAC) model and automatically analyzed using Alloy, which is a formal verification tool. This will provide assurance to the consumer that these devices will be compliant to the home or organizational policy even before they have been purchased.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that allows connection between devices using the internet to collect and exchange data with each other. Privacy and security have become the most pressing issues in the IoT network, especially in the smart home. Nevertheless, there are still many smart home devices that have not implemented security and privacy policies. This study proposes a remote sensor control system built on ESP32 to implement a smart home through the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport(MQTT) protocol by applying the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with a 256-bit key. It addresses security issues in the smart home by encrypting messages sent from users to sensors. Besides ESP32, the system implementation also uses Raspberry Pi and smartphone with Android applications. The network was analyzed using Wireshark, and it showed that the message sent was encrypted. This implementation could prevent brute force attacks, with the result that it could guarantee the confidentiality of a message. Meanwhile, from several experiments conducted in this study, the difference in the average time of sending encrypted and unencrypted messages was not too significant, i.e., 20 ms.

We propose an autoencoder based approach to anomaly detection in smart grid systems. Data collecting sensors within smart home systems are susceptible to many data corruption issues, such as malicious attacks or physical malfunctions. By applying machine learning to a smart home or grid, sensor anomalies can be detected automatically for secure data collection and sensor-based system functionality. In addition, we tested the effectiveness of this approach on real smart home sensor data collected for multiple years. An early detection of such data corruption issues is essential to the security and functionality of the various sensors and devices within a smart home.

Despite the surging development and utilization of IoT devices, the security of IoT devices is still in infancy. The security pitfalls of IoT devices have made it easy for hackers to take over IoT devices and use them for malicious activities like botnet attacks. With the rampant emergence of IoT devices, botnet attacks are surging. The botnet attacks are not only catastrophic for IoT device users but also for the rest of the world. Therefore, there is a crucial need to identify and mitigate the possible threats in IoT devices during the design phase. Threat modelling is a technique that is used to identify the threats in the earlier stages of the system design activity. In this paper, we propose a threat modelling approach to analyze and mitigate the botnet attacks in an IoT smart home use case. The proposed methodology identifies the development-level and application-level threats in smart home use case using STRIDE and VAST threat modelling methods. Moreover, we reticulate the identified threats with botnet attacks. Finally, we propose the mitigation techniques for all identified threats including the botnet threats.

The development of IPv6-based wireless local area networks is becoming increasingly mature, and it has defined no less than different standards to meet the needs of different applications. Wireless home networks are widely used because they can be seamlessly connected to daily life, especially smart home devices linked to it. There are certain security issues with smart home devices deployed in wireless home networks, such as data tampering and leakage of sensitive information. This paper proposes a smart home management system based on IPv6 wireless home network, and develops a prototype system deployed on mobile portable devices. Through this system, different roles in the wireless home network can be dynamically authorized and smart home resources can be allocated to achieve the purpose of access control and management.

Computing capabilities such as real time data, unlimited connection, data from sensors, environmental analysis, automated decisions (machine learning) are demanded by many areas like industry for example decision making, machine learning, by research and military, for example GPS, sensor data collection. The possibility to make these features compatible with each domain that demands them is known as ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing includes network topologies such as wireless sensor networks (WSN) which can help further improving the existing communication, for example the Internet. Also, ubiquitous computing is included in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this article, it is discussed the mobility of WSN and its advantages and innovations, which make possible implementations for smart home and office. Knowing the growing number of mobile users, we place the mobile phone as the key factor of the future ubiquitous wireless networks. With secure computing, communicating, and storage capacities of mobile devices, they can be taken advantage of in terms of architecture in the sense of scalability, energy efficiency, packet delay, etc. Our work targets to present a structure from a ubiquitous computing point of view for researchers who have an interest in ubiquitous computing and want to research on the analysis, to implement a novel method structure for the ubiquitous computing system in military sectors. Also, this paper presents security and privacy issues in ubiquitous sensor networks (USN).

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.

While Explanatory AI (XAI) is attracting increasing interest from academic research, most AI-based solutions still rely on black box methods. This is unsuitable for certain domains, such as smart homes, where transparency is key to gaining user trust and solution adoption. Moreover, smart homes are challenging environments for XAI, as they are decentralized systems that undergo runtime changes. We aim to develop an XAI solution for addressing problems that an autonomic management system either could not resolve or resolved in a surprising manner. This implies situations where the current state of affairs is not what the user expected, hence requiring an explanation. The objective is to solve the apparent conflict between expectation and observation through understandable logical steps, thus generating an argumentative dialogue. While focusing on the smart home domain, our approach is intended to be generic and transferable to other cyber-physical systems offering similar challenges. This position paper focuses on proposing a decentralized algorithm, called D-CAN, and its corresponding generic decentralized architecture. This approach is particularly suited for SISSY systems, as it enables XAI functions to be extended and updated when devices join and leave the managed system dynamically. We illustrate our proposal via several representative case studies from the smart home domain.

Internet of Things (IoT) now has extremely wide applications in many areas of life such as urban management, environmental management, smart shopping, and smart home. Because of the wide range of application fields, the IoT infrastructures are built differently. To make an IoT system indoor with high efficiency and more convenience, a case study for smart home security using Bluetooth Mesh approach is introduced. By using Bluetooth Mesh technology in home security, the user can open the door everywhere inside their house. The system work in a flexible way since it can extend the working range of network. In addition, the system can monitor the state of both the lock and any node in network by using a gateway to transfer data to cloud and enable a website-based interface.

The advancement in technologies like IoT, device-to-device communication lead to concepts like smart home and smart cities, etc. In smart home architecture, different devices such as home appliances, personal computers, surveillance cameras, etc. are connected to the Internet and enable the user to monitor and control irrespective of time and location. IPv6-enabled 6LoWPAN is a low-power, low-range communication protocol designed and developed for the short-range IoT applications. 6LoWPAN is based on IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and IPv6 network protocol for low range wireless applications. Although 6LoWPAN supports different routing protocols, RPL is the widely used routing protocol for low power and lossy networks. In this work, we have taken an IoT enabled smart home environment, in which 6LoWPAN is used as a communication and RPL as a routing protocol. The performance of this proposed network model is analyzed based on the different performance metrics such as latency, PDR, and throughput. The proposed model is simulated using Cooja simulator running over the Contiki OS. Along with the Cooja simulator, the network analyzer tool Wireshark is used to analyze the network behaviors.

The popularity and demand of home automation has increased exponentially in recent years because of the ease it provides. Recently, development has been done in this domain and few systems have been proposed that either use voice assistants or application for controlling the electrical appliances. However; less emphasis is laid on power efficiency and this system cannot be integrated with the existing appliances and hence, the entire system needs to be upgraded adding to a lot of additional cost in purchasing new appliances. In this research, the objective is to design such a system that emphasises on power efficiency as well as can be integrated with the already existing appliances. NodeMCU, along with Raspberry Pi, Firebase realtime database, is used to create a system that accomplishes such endeavours and can control relays, which can control these appliances without the need of replacing them. The experiments in this paper demonstrate triggering of electrical appliances using voice assistant, fire alarm on the basis of flame sensor and temperature sensor. Moreover; use of android application was presented for operating electrical appliances from a remote location. Lastly, the system can be modified by adding security cameras, smart blinds, robot vacuums etc.

Recent years have seen significant growth in the adoption of smart homes devices. These devices provide convenience, security, and energy efficiency to users. For example, smart security cameras can detect unauthorized movements, and smoke sensors can detect potential fire accidents. However, many recent examples have shown that they open up a new cyber threat surface. There have been several recent examples of smart devices being hacked for privacy violations and also misused so as to perform DDoS attacks. In this paper, we explore the application of big data and machine learning to identify anomalous activities that can occur in a smart home environment. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is trained on network level sensor data, created from a test bed with multiple sensors and smart devices. The generated HMM model is shown to achieve an accuracy of 97% in identifying potential anomalies that indicate attacks. We present our approach to build this model and compare with other techniques available in the literature.

The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices has surged in recent years. However, due to the lack of substantial security, IoT devices are vulnerable to cyber-attacks like Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Most of the current security solutions are either computationally expensive or unscalable as they require known attack signatures or full packet inspection. In this paper, we introduce a novel Graph-based Outlier Detection in Internet of Things (GODIT) approach that (i) represents smart home IoT traffic as a real-time graph stream, (ii) efficiently processes graph data, and (iii) detects DoS attack in real-time. The experimental results on real-world data collected from IoT-equipped smart home show that GODIT is more effective than the traditional machine learning approaches, and is able to outperform current graph-stream anomaly detection approaches.

With the ever-increasing number of smart home devices, the issues related to these environments are also growing. With an ever-growing attack surface, there is no standard way to protect homes and their inhabitants from new threats. The inhabitants are rarely aware of the increased security threats that they are exposed to and how to manage them. To tackle this problem, we propose a solution based on segmented architectures similar to the ones used in industrial systems. In this approach, the smart home is segmented into various levels, which can broadly be categorised into an inner level and external level. The external level is protected by a firewall that checks the communication from/to the Internet to/from the external devices. The internal level is protected by an additional firewall that filters the information and the communications between the external and the internal devices. This segmentation guarantees a trusted environment among the entities of the internal network. In this paper, we propose an adaptive trust model that checks the behaviour of the entities and in case the entities violate trust rules they can be put in quarantine or banned from the network.

Strong designated verifier signature scheme is a concept in which a user (signer) can issue a digital signature for a special receiver; i.e. signature is produced in such way that only intended verifier can check the validity of produced signature. Of course, this type of signature scheme should be such that no third party is able to validate the signature. In other words, the related designated verifier cannot assign the issued signature to another third party. This article proposes a new ID-based strong designated verifier signature scheme which has provable security in the ROM (Random Oracle Model) and BDH assumption. The proposed scheme satisfies the all security requirements of an ID-based strong designated verifier signature scheme. In addition, we propose some usage scenarios for the proposed schemes in different applications in the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing era.

The interest over building security-based solutions to reduce the vulnerability exploits and mitigate the risks associated with smart homes in IoT is growing. However, our investigation identified to architect and implement distributed security mechanisms is still a challenge because is necessary to handle security and privacy in IoT middleware with a strong focus. Our investigation, it was identified the significant proportion of the systems that did not address security and did not describe the security approach in any meaningful detail. The idea proposed in this work is to provide middleware aim to implement security mechanisms in smart home and contribute as how guide to beginner developers' IoT middleware. The advantages of using MidSecThings are to avoid leakage data, unavailable service, unidentification action and not authorized access over IoT devices in smart home.

Blockchain is the one of leading technology of this time; it has started to revolutionize several fields like, finance, business, industry, smart home, healthcare, social networks, Internet and the Internet of Things. It has many benefits like, decentralized network, robustness, availability, stability, anonymity, auditability and accountability. The applications of Blockchain are emerging, and it is found that most of the work is focused on its engineering implementation. While the theoretical part is very less considered and explored. In this paper we implemented the simulation of mining process in Blockchain based systems using queuing theory. We took the parameters of one of the mature Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin's real data and simulated using M/M/n/L queuing system in JSIMgraph. We have achieved realistic results; and expect that it will open up new research direction in theoretical research of Blockchain based systems.

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.

Context-based zero-interaction has become the trend for smart IoT device pairing. In this paper, we propose a secure and usable mechanism to authenticate devices co-located in smart home scenario, and build a secure communication channel between legitimate devices by utilizing on-board microphones to capture a common audio context. After receiving randomly generated sound signals, smart IoT device uses the time intervals between salient sound signals to derive audio fingerprint which can be matched among co-present devices and then be used to bootstrap trust of the devices. The protocol is based on the idea that devices co-located within a physical security boundary (e.g., single family house) can hear similar sounds, and the devices outside would miss parts of sound signals due to the attenuation when sounds pass through the wall. To accelerate the generation rate of audio fingerprint, an extra sound source is introduced. We implement our protocol on Android devices, and the experiment results show that the protocol can distinguish the malicious devices outside from the legitimate devices located inside a security boundary and can quickly establish a strong secret-key between legitimate devices.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a consolidated reality. Smart homes are equipped with a growing number of IoT devices that capture more and more information about human beings lives. However, manufacturers paid little or no attention to security, so that various challenges are still in place. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure IoT systems that combines the concept of Security-by-Contract (S×C) with the Fog computing distributed paradigm. We define the pillars of our approach, namely the notions of IoT device contract, Fog node policy and contract-policy matching, the respective life-cycles, and the resulting S×C workflow. To better understand all the concepts of the S×C framework, and highlight its practical feasibility, we use a running case study based on a context-aware system deployed in a real smart home.

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) results in generating massive amounts of data. Significant portions of these data are sensitive since they reflect (directly or indirectly) peoples' behaviors, interests, lifestyles, etc. Protecting sensitive IoT data from privacy violations is a challenge since these data need to be communicated, processed, analyzed, and stored by public networks, servers, and clouds; most of them are untrusted parties for data owners. We propose a solution for protecting sensitive IoT data called Policy Enforcement Fog Module (PEFM). The major task of the PEFM solution is mandatory enforcement of privacy policies for sensitive IoT data-wherever these data are accessed throughout their entire lifecycle. The key feature of PEFM is its placement within the fog computing infrastructure, which assures that PEFM operates as closely as possible to data sources within the edge. PEFM enforces policies directly for local IoT applications. In contrast, for remote applications, PEFM provides a self-protecting mechanism based on creating and disseminating Active Data Bundles (ADBs). ADBs are software constructs bundling inseparably sensitive data, their privacy policies, and an execution engine able to enforce privacy policies. To prove effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed module, we developed a smart home proof-of-concept scenario. We investigate privacy threats for sensitive IoT data. We run simulation experiments, based on network calculus, for testing performance of the PEFM controls for different network configurations. The results of the simulation show that-even with using from 1 to 5 additional privacy policies for improved data privacy-penalties in terms of execution time and delay are reasonable (approx. 12-15% and 13-19%, respectively). The results also show that PEFM is scalable regarding the number of the real-time constraints for real-time IoT applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a contemporary concept for connecting the existing things in our environment with the Internet for a sake of making the objects information are accessible from anywhere and anytime to support a modern life style based on the Internet. With the rapid development of the IoT technologies and widely spreading in most of the fields such as buildings, health, education, transportation and agriculture. Thus, the IoT applications require increasing data collection from the IoT devices to send these data to the applications or servers which collect or analyze the data, so it is a very important to secure the data and ensure that do not reach a malicious adversary. This paper reviews some attacks in the IoT applications and the security weaknesses in the IoT environment. In addition, this study presents the challenges of IoT in terms of hardware, network and software. Moreover, this paper summarizes and points to some attacks on the smart car, smart home, smart campus, smart farm and healthcare.

We present an intelligent system that focus on how to ensure the stability of ZigBee network automatically. First, we discussed on the character of ZigBee compared with WIFI. Pointed out advantage of ZigBee resides in security, stability, low power consumption and better expandability. Second, figuring out the shortcomings of ZigBee on application is that physical limitation of the frequency band and weak ability on diffraction, especially coming across a wall or a door in the actual environment of home. The third, to put forward a method which can be used to ensure the strength of ZigBee signal. The method is to detect the strength of ZigBee relay in advance. And then, to compare it with the threshold value which had been defined in previous. The threshold value of strength of ZigBee is the minimal and tolerable value which can ensure stable transmission of ZigBee. If the detected value is out of the range of threshold, system will prompt up warning message which can be used to hint user to add ZigBee reply between the original ZigBee node and ZigBee gateway.

Ever-driven by technological innovation, the Internet of Things (IoT) is continuing its exceptional evolution and growth into the common consumer space. In the wake of these developments, this paper proposes a framework for an IoT home security system that is secure, expandable, and accessible. Congruent with the ideals of the IoT, we are proposing a system utilizing an ultra-low-power wireless sensor network which would interface with a central hub via Bluetooth 4, commonly referred to as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), to monitor the home. Additionally, the system would interface with an Amazon Echo to accept user voice commands. The aforementioned central hub would also act as a web server and host an internet accessible configuration page from which users could monitor and customize their system. An internet-connected system would carry the capability to notify the users of system alarms via SMS or email. Finally, this proof of concept is intended to demonstrate expandability into other areas of home automation or building monitoring functions in general.