Biblio

As a current disruptive and transformative technology, artificial intelligence is constantly infiltrating all aspects of production and life. However, with the in-depth development and application of artificial intelligence, the security challenges it faces have become more and more prominent. In the real world, attacks against intelligent systems such as the Internet of Things, smart homes, and driverless cars are constantly appearing, and incidents of artificial intelligence being used in cyber-attacks and cybercrimes frequently occur. This article aims to discuss artificial intelligence security issues and propose some countermeasures.

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 Internet of Things (IoT) is enabling smart houses, where multiple users with complex social relationships interact with smart devices. This requires sophisticated access control specification and enforcement models, that are currently lacking. In this paper, we introduce the extended generalized role based access control (EGRBAC) model for smart home IoT. We provide a formal definition for EGRBAC and illustrate its features with a use case. A proof-of-concept demonstration utilizing AWS-IoT Greengrass is discussed in the appendix. EGRBAC is a first step in developing a comprehensive family of access control models for smart home IoT.

Humans are a key part of software development, including customers, designers, coders, testers and end users. In this keynote talk I explain why incorporating human-centric issues into software engineering for next-generation applications is critical. I use several examples from our recent and current work on handling human-centric issues when engineering various `smart living' cloud- and edge-based software systems. This includes using human-centric, domain-specific visual models for non-technical experts to specify and generate data analysis applications; personality impact on aspects of software activities; incorporating end user emotions into software requirements engineering for smart homes; incorporating human usage patterns into emerging edge computing applications; visualising smart city-related data; reporting diverse software usability defects; and human-centric security and privacy requirements for smart living systems. I assess the usefulness of these approaches, highlight some outstanding research challenges, and briefly discuss our current work on new human-centric approaches to software engineering for smart living applications.

Today our world benefits from Internet of Things (IoT) technology; however, new security problems arise when these IoT devices are introduced into our homes. Because many of these IoT devices have access to the Internet and they have little to no security, they make our smart homes highly vulnerable to compromise. Some of the threats include IoT botnets and generic confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) attacks. Our research explores botnet detection by experimenting with supervised machine learning and deep-learning classifiers. Further, our approach assesses classifier performance on unbalanced datasets that contain benign data, mixed in with small amounts of malicious data. We demonstrate that the classifiers can separate malicious activity from benign activity within a small IoT network dataset. The classifiers can also separate malicious activity from benign activity in increasingly larger datasets. Our experiments have demonstrated incremental improvement in results for (1) accuracy, (2) probability of detection, and (3) probability of false alarm. The best performance results include 99.9% accuracy, 99.8% probability of detection, and 0% probability of false alarm. This paper also demonstrates how the performance of these classifiers increases, as IoT training datasets become larger and larger.

This work describes the architecture and prototype implementation of a novel trust-aware continuous authorization technology that targets consumer Internet of Things (IoT), e.g., Smart Home. Our approach extends previous authorization models in three complementary ways: (1) By incorporating trust-level evaluation formulae as conditions inside authorization rules and policies, while supporting the evaluation of such policies through the fusion of an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) authorization policy engine with a Trust-Level-Evaluation-Engine (TLEE). (2) By introducing contextualized, continuous monitoring and re-evaluation of policies throughout the authorization life-cycle. That is, mutable attributes about subjects, resources and environment as well as trust levels that are continuously monitored while obtaining an authorization, throughout the duration of or after revoking an existing authorization. Whenever change is detected, the corresponding authorization rules, including both access control rules and trust level expressions, are re-evaluated.(3) By minimizing the computational and memory footprint and maximizing concurrency and modular evaluation to improve performance while preserving the continuity of monitoring. Finally we introduce an application of such model in Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) for consumer IoT.

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.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attack that compromised the bandwidth of the whole network by choking down all the available network resources which are publically available, thus makes access to that resource unavailable. The DDoS attack is more vulnerable than a normal DoS attack because here the sources of attack origin are more than one, so users cannot even estimate how to detect and where to take actions so that attacks can be dissolved. This paper proposed a unique approach for DDoS detection using the shortest path algorithm. This Paper suggests that the remedy that must be taken in order to counter-affect the DDoS attack in a smart home network.

Smart home is one application of the pervasive computing branch of science. Three categories of smart homes, namely comfort, healthcare, and security. The security system is a part of smart home technology that is very important because the intensity of crime is increasing, especially in residential areas. The system will detect the face by the webcam camera if the user enters the correct password. Face recognition will be processed by the Raspberry pi 3 microcontroller with the Principal Component Analysis method using OpenCV and Python software which has outputs, namely actuators in the form of a solenoid lock door and buzzer. The test results show that the webcam can perform face detection when the password input is successful, then the buzzer actuator can turn on when the database does not match the data taken by the webcam or the test data and the solenoid door lock actuator can run if the database matches the test data taken by the sensor. webcam. The mean response time of face detection is 1.35 seconds.

The Internet of Things enables interaction between IoT devices and users through the cloud. The cloud provides services such as account monitoring, device management, and device control. As the center of the IoT platform, the cloud provides services to IoT devices and IoT applications through APIs. Therefore, the permission verification of the API is essential. However, we found that some APIs are unverified, which allows unauthorized users to access cloud resources or control devices; it could threaten the security of devices and cloud. To check for unauthorized access to the API, we developed IoT-APIScanner, a framework to check the permission verification of the cloud API. Through observation, we found there is a large amount of interactive information between IoT application and cloud, which include the APIs and related parameters, so we can extract them by analyzing the code of the IoT application, and use this for mutating API test cases. Through these test cases, we can effectively check the permissions of the API. In our research, we extracted a total of 5 platform APIs. Among them, the proportion of APIs without permission verification reached 13.3%. Our research shows that attackers could use the API without permission verification to obtain user privacy or control of devices.

With the popularization and application of Internet of Things technology, the degree of intelligence of the home system is getting higher and higher. As an important part of the smart home, the security system plays an important role in protecting against accidents such as flammable gas leakage, fire, and burglary that may occur in the home environment. This design focuses on sensor signal acquisition and processing, wireless access, and cloud applications, and integrates Cypress’s new generation of PSoC 6 MCU, CYW4343W Wi-Fi and Bluetooth dual-module chips, and Amazon’s AWS cloud into smart home security System designing. First, through the designed air conditioning and refrigeration module, fire warning processing module, lighting control module, ventilation fan control module, combustible gas and smoke detection and warning module, important parameter information in the home environment is obtained. Then, the hardware system is connected to the AWS cloud platform through Wi-Fi; finally, a WEB interface is built in the AWS cloud to realize remote monitoring of the smart home environment. This design has a good reference for the design of future smart home security systems.

Home automation is an intelligent, functional as a unit system that facilitates home processes without unnecessarily complicating the user's life. Devices can be connected, which in turn connect and talk through a centralized control unit, which are accessible via mobile phones. These devices include lights, appliances, security systems, alarms and many other sensors and devices. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Bluetooth based smart home automation system which uses a Peripheral interface controller (PIC) microcontroller (16F1937) as the main processer and the appliances are connected to the peripheral ports of the microcontroller via relays. The circuit in the project was designed in Diptrace software. The PCB layout design was completed. The fully functional smart home prototype was built and demonstrated to functional.

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.

Advancements in computing, communication, and sensing technologies are making it possible to embed, control, and gather vital information from tiny devices that are being deployed and utilized in practically every aspect of our modernized society. From smart home appliances to municipal water and electric industrial facilities to our everyday work environments, the next Internet frontier, dubbed IoT, is promising to revolutionize our lives and tackle some of our nations' most pressing challenges. While the seamless interconnection of IoT devices with the physical realm is envisioned to bring a plethora of critical improvements in many aspects and diverse domains, it will undoubtedly pave the way for attackers that will target and exploit such devices, threatening the integrity of their data and the reliability of critical infrastructure. Further, such compromised devices will undeniably be leveraged as the next generation of botnets, given their increased processing capabilities and abundant bandwidth. While several demonstrations exist in the literature describing the exploitation procedures of a number of IoT devices, the up-to-date inference, characterization, and analysis of unsolicited IoT devices that are currently deployed "in the wild" is still in its infancy. In this article, we address this imperative task by leveraging active and passive measurements to report on unsolicited Internet-scale IoT devices. This work describes a first step toward exploring the utilization of passive measurements in combination with the results of active measurements to shed light on the Internet-scale insecurities of the IoT paradigm. By correlating results of Internet-wide scanning with Internet background radiation traffic, we disclose close to 14,000 compromised IoT devices in diverse sectors, including critical infrastructure and smart home appliances. To this end, we also analyze their generated traffic to create effective mitigation signatures that could be deployed in local IoT realms. To support largescale empirical data analytics in the context of IoT, we make available the inferred and extracted IoT malicious raw data through an authenticated front-end service. The outcomes of this work confirm the existence of such compromised devices on an Internet scale, while the generated inferences and insights are postulated to be employed for inferring other similarly compromised IoT devices, in addition to contributing to IoT cyber security situational awareness.

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.

Training the future cybersecurity workforce to respond to emerging threats requires introduction of novel educational interventions into the cybersecurity curriculum. To be effective, these interventions have to incorporate trending knowledge from cybersecurity and other related domains while allowing for experiential learning through hands-on experimentation. To date, the traditional interdisciplinary approach for cybersecurity training has infused political science, law, economics or linguistics knowledge into the cybersecurity curriculum, allowing for limited experimentation. Cybersecurity students were left with little opportunity to acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities in domains outside of these. Also, students in outside majors had no options to get into cybersecurity. With this in mind, we developed an interdisciplinary course for experiential learning in the fields of cybersecurity and interaction design. The inaugural course teaches students from cybersecurity, user interaction design, and visual design the principles of designing for secure use - or secure design - and allows them to apply them for prototyping of Internet-of-Things (IoT) products for smart homes. This paper elaborates on the concepts of secure design and how our approach enhances the training of the future cybersecurity workforce.

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.

We are living in a society where technology is present everywhere we go. We are striving towards smart homes, smart cities, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything. Not so long ago, a password was all you needed for secure authentication. Nowadays, even the most complicated passwords are not considered enough. Multi-factor authentication is gaining more and more terrain. Complex system may also require more than one solution for real, strong security. The present paper proposes a framework based with MFA as a basis for access control and data analytics. Events within a cyber-physical system are processed and analyzed in an attempt to detect, prevent and mitigate possible attacks.

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.

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.

Internet of Things (IoT) is spreading increasingly in different areas of application. Accordingly, IoT also gets deployed in health care including ambient assisted living, telemedicine or medical smart homes. However, IoT also involves risks. Next to increased security issues also safety concerns are occurring. Deploying health care sensors and utilizing medical data causes a high need for IoT architectures free of vulnerabilities in order to identify weak points as early as possible. To address this, we are developing a safety and security analysis approach including a standardized meta model and an IoT safety and security framework comprising a customizable analysis language.

The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks, emerge as areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utilizes a private forensic evidence database, where the captured evidence is stored, along with a permissioned blockchain that allows providing security services like integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, so that the evidence can be used in a court of law. The blockchain stores evidences' metadata, which are critical for providing the aforementioned services, and interacts via smart contracts with the different entities involved in an investigation process, including Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. A high-level architecture of the blockchain-based solution is presented that allows tackling the unique challenges posed by the need for digitally handling forensic evidence collected from IoT networks.

Internet of things is a network formed between two or more devices through internet which helps in sharing data and resources. IoT is present everywhere and lot of applications in our day-to-day life such as smart homes, smart grid system which helps in reducing energy consumption, smart garbage collection to make cities clean, smart cities etc. It has some limitations too such as concerns of security of the network and the cost of installations of the devices. There have been many researches proposed various method in improving the IoT systems. In this paper, we have discussed about the scope and limitations of IoT in various fields and we have also proposed a technique to secure offline architecture of IoT.