Month: October 2020

Inside the dolls house…

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Earlier in September, I participated in a short film showcasing some of the research projects being carried out by the Faculty of Technology and Society, part of Malmö University. The film was directed by Hanna Solberger (media producer at Malmö University) and her talented production team.

This was my first experience of being filmed in a professional studio and being directed by a film crew in Sweden. It was a very professional job filled with amazing touches of creativity by the film director! You can see me featured in the video cover picture below,  inside the most private room in the house…and yes I am talking about privacy 😉

Image taken from the video ‘Människan & Tekniken’.

The video was used for research funding purposes part of the event called ‘Människan & Tekniken’. You can access the full video  by clicking the link here: https://play.mau.se/media/t/0_7vlkv9tz

Memories of a Good Seminar

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It has been a bit more than 2 years ago I defended my Licentiate thesis. Here is a wonderful memory from that time! A lot of things have changed since then in the smart home world and also in the course of my research and academic career.

 

In case you have queries just feel free to get in touch! I am also very much involved in supervising theses on cutting edge technologies of the like of autonomous drones, smart cities, to more industry-oriented work such as measuring the effects of GDPR on IoT consumers.

Is Your Home Becoming A Spy?

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On 9th October, I had the opportunity to present my paper at the IoT 2020 conference. I talked about smart connected homes to conference attendees participating in the security track. The presentation was pre-recorded and played to an online audience over Zoom.  It was in the format of a 12 mins presentation followed by 8 mins QA.

My presentation slot at IoT 2020.

The theme that I covered was about covert surveillance facilitated through commercial smart home systems retrofitted in homes around the globe.  In the study, we organized 81 systems by their data-collection capabilities with the intention of better understanding their privacy implications. Also, we identified research directions and suggested ways that allow users more control, transparency, and ethical uses over their personal data.

You can take a look at the presentation slides here. Also, please free to email me in case you need more information about my work.

Online Lecture about IoT Security

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On 01 October, I was invited to deliver an online lecture about the topic of securing the Internet of Things (IoT) to Lund University Bachelors students. I have been researching security and privacy on a full-time time basis for the past five years and working on information security for well over a decade.

My lecture consisted of a two-hour presentation, where I focused on some key attacks targeting consumer and industrial IoT applications. Denial-of-service attacks, routing attacks, and service attacks of which we have been talking about for many years have become even more serious. For instance, think about Mirai, the botnet which broke out in 2016, and other malware targeting unsecured IoT devices such as webcams. This is partly happening due to the interconnectedness of the devices, but especially due to a lack of inbuilt security measures. In this regard, Vint Cerf, one of the computer scientists hailed as a founding father of the Internet, said in an ACM panel in 2017:

“The biggest worry I have is that people building [IoT] devices will grab a piece of open source software or operating system and just jam it into the device and send it out into the wild without giving adequate thought and effort to securing the system and providing convenient user access to those devices.”

Although plugging any device to the Internet is becoming the trend especially with the rise of the IoT, I believe that companies should put in more effort into securing their devices prior to releasing them to the consumer market. Unfortunately, it is still common to run simple attacks, such as SQL injections, on IoT devices, and finding them vulnerable to that.