Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Keyword is building management systems  [Clear All Filters]
2021-02-16
Mace, J. C., Czekster, R. Melo, Morisset, C., Maple, C..  2020.  Smart Building Risk Assessment Case Study: Challenges, Deficiencies and Recommendations. 2020 16th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC). :59—64.
Inter-networked control systems make smart buildings increasingly efficient but can lead to severe operational disruptions and infrastructure damage. It is vital the security state of smart buildings is properly assessed so that thorough and cost effective risk management can be established. This paper uniquely reports on an actual risk assessment performed in 2018 on one of the world's most densely monitored, state-of-the-art, smart buildings. From our observations, we suggest that current practice may be inadequate due to a number of challenges and deficiencies, including the lack of a recognised smart building risk assessment methodology. As a result, the security posture of many smart buildings may not be as robust as their risk assessments suggest. Crucially, we highlight a number of key recommendations for a more comprehensive risk assessment process for smart buildings. As a whole, we believe this practical experience report will be of interest to a range of smart building stakeholders.
2020-10-06
Amarasinghe, Kasun, Wickramasinghe, Chathurika, Marino, Daniel, Rieger, Craig, Manicl, Milos.  2018.  Framework for Data Driven Health Monitoring of Cyber-Physical Systems. 2018 Resilience Week (RWS). :25—30.

Modern infrastructure is heavily reliant on systems with interconnected computational and physical resources, named Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). Hence, building resilient CPSs is a prime need and continuous monitoring of the CPS operational health is essential for improving resilience. This paper presents a framework for calculating and monitoring of health in CPSs using data driven techniques. The main advantages of this data driven methodology is that the ability of leveraging heterogeneous data streams that are available from the CPSs and the ability of performing the monitoring with minimal a priori domain knowledge. The main objective of the framework is to warn the operators of any degradation in cyber, physical or overall health of the CPS. The framework consists of four components: 1) Data acquisition and feature extraction, 2) state identification and real time state estimation, 3) cyber-physical health calculation and 4) operator warning generation. Further, this paper presents an initial implementation of the first three phases of the framework on a CPS testbed involving a Microgrid simulation and a cyber-network which connects the grid with its controller. The feature extraction method and the use of unsupervised learning algorithms are discussed. Experimental results are presented for the first two phases and the results showed that the data reflected different operating states and visualization techniques can be used to extract the relationships in data features.

2020-07-16
Mace, J.C., Morisset, C., Pierce, K., Gamble, C., Maple, C., Fitzgerald, J..  2018.  A multi-modelling based approach to assessing the security of smart buildings. Living in the Internet of Things: Cybersecurity of the IoT – 2018. :1—10.

Smart buildings are controlled by multiple cyber-physical systems that provide critical services such as heating, ventilation, lighting and access control. These building systems are becoming increasingly vulnerable to both cyber and physical attacks. We introduce a multi-model methodology for assessing the security of these systems, which utilises INTO-CPS, a suite of modelling, simulation, and analysis tools for designing cyber-physical systems. Using a fan coil unit case study we show how its security can be systematically assessed when subjected to Man-in-the-Middle attacks on the data connections between system components. We suggest our methodology would enable building managers and security engineers to design attack countermeasures and refine their effectiveness.

2020-01-02
Yu, Jianguo, Tian, Pei, Feng, Haonan, Xiao, Yan.  2018.  Research and Design of Subway BAS Intrusion Detection Expert System. 2018 IEEE 3rd Advanced Information Technology, Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IAEAC). :152–156.
The information security of urban rail transit system faces great challenges. As a subsystem of the subway, BAS is short for Building Automation System, which is used to monitor and manage subway equipment and environment, also facing the same problem. Based on the characteristics of BAS, this paper designed a targeted intrusion detection expert system. This paper focuses on the design of knowledge base and the inference engine of intrusion detection system based on expert system. This study laid the foundation for the research on information security of the entire rail transit system.
2018-08-23
Prakash, Y. W., Biradar, V., Vincent, S., Martin, M., Jadhav, A..  2017.  Smart bluetooth low energy security system. 2017 International Conference on Wireless Communications, Signal Processing and Networking (WiSPNET). :2141–2146.

The need for security in today's world has become a mandatory issue to look after. With the increase in a number of thefts, it has become a necessity to implement a smart security system. Due to the high cost of the existing smart security systems which use conventional Bluetooth and other wireless technologies and their relatively high energy consumption, implementing a security system with low energy consumption at a low cost has become the need of the hour. The objective of the paper is to build a cost effective and low energy consumption security system using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. This system will help the user to monitor and manage the security of the house even when the user is outside the house with the help of webpage. This paper presents the design and implementation of a security system using PSoC 4 BLE which can automatically lock and unlock the door when the user in the vicinity and leaving the vicinity of the door respectively by establishing a wireless connection between the physical lock and the smartphone. The system also captures an image of a person arriving at the house and transmits it wirelessly to a webpage. The system also notifies the user of any intrusion by sending a message and the image of the intruder to the webpage. The user can also access the door remotely on the go from the website.

2018-04-11
Meyer, D., Haase, J., Eckert, M., Klauer, B..  2017.  New Attack Vectors for Building Automation and IoT. IECON 2017 - 43rd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. :8126–8131.

In the past the security of building automation solely depended on the security of the devices inside or tightly connected to the building. In the last years more devices evolved using some kind of cloud service as a back-end or providers supplying some kind of device to the user. Also, the number of building automation systems connected to the Internet for management, control, and data storage increases every year. These developments cause the appearance of new threats on building automation. As Internet of Thing (IoT) and building automation intertwine more and more these threats are also valid for IoT installations. The paper presents new attack vectors and new threats using the threat model of Meyer et al.[1].

2017-12-12
Sylla, A. N., Louvel, M., Rutten, E., Delaval, G..  2017.  Design Framework for Reliable Multiple Autonomic Loops in Smart Environments. 2017 International Conference on Cloud and Autonomic Computing (ICCAC). :131–142.

Today's control systems such as smart environments have the ability to adapt to their environment in order to achieve a set of objectives (e.g., comfort, security and energy savings). This is done by changing their behaviour upon the occurrence of specific events. Building such a system requires to design and implement autonomic loops that collect events and measurements, make decisions and execute the corresponding actions.The design and the implementation of such loops are made difficult by several factors: the complexity of systems with multiple objectives, the risk of conflicting decisions between multiple loops, the inconsistencies that can result from communication errors and hardware failures and the heterogeneity of the devices.In this paper, we propose a design framework for reliable and self-adaptive systems, where multiple autonomic loops can be composed into complex managers, and we consider its application to smart environments. We build upon the proposed framework a generic autonomic loop which combines an automata-based controller that makes correct and coherent decisions, a transactional execution mechanism that avoids inconsistencies, and an abstraction layer that hides the heterogeneity of the devices.We propose patterns for composition of such loops, in parallel, coordinated, and hierarchically, with benefits from the leveraging of automata-based modular constructs, that provides for guarantees on the correct behaviour of the controlled system. We implement our framework with the transactional middleware LINC, the reactive language Heptagon/BZR and the abstraction framework PUTUTU. A case study in the field of building automation is presented to illustrate the proposed framework.

2017-03-08
Pienaar, J. P., Fisher, R. M., Hancke, G. P..  2015.  Smartphone: The key to your connected smart home. 2015 IEEE 13th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN). :999–1004.

Automation systems are gaining popularity around the world. The use of these powerful technologies for home security has been proposed and some systems have been developed. Other implementations see the user taking a central role in providing and receiving updates to the system. We propose a system making use of an Android based smartphone as the user control point. Our Android application allows for dual factor (facial and secret pin) based authentication in order to protect the privacy of the user. The system successfully implements facial recognition on the limited resources of a smartphone by making use of the Eigenfaces algorithm. The system we created was designed for home automation but makes use of technologies that allow it to be applied within any environment. This opens the possibility for more research into dual factor authentication and the architecture of our system provides a blue print for the implementation of home based automation systems. This system with minimal modifications can be applied within an industrial application.

2015-04-30
Di Benedetto, M.D., D'Innocenzo, A., Smarra, F..  2014.  Fault-tolerant control of a wireless HVAC control system. Communications, Control and Signal Processing (ISCCSP), 2014 6th International Symposium on. :235-238.

In this paper we address the problem of designing a fault tolerant control scheme for an HVAC control system where sensing and actuation data are exchanged with a centralized controller via a wireless sensors and actuators network where the communication nodes are subject to permanent failures and malicious intrusions.