smart homes

Data Security and Privacy in the Era of Floating Homes

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Image source: https://reinaboats.com/reinaboats/reina-mini-t24

Slightly over a year ago, I mentioned Ocean Builders’ innovative living pods and how they are using smart home technologies in their vessels. Now, a new contender, Reina, takes the stage. Reina’s flagship yacht home model, the luxurious Reina Live L44DR, showcases not only lavishness but enhanced comfort and convenience also by incorporating smart home functionalities (smart TV, smart speakers, etc.).

The transition from a fixed abode to a mobile dwelling incites inquiry. Can a floating home offer a higher degree of security and privacy compared to its stationary counterpart? Do the potential challenges of connectivity experienced within the realm of floating homes share similarities with those encountered in the context of connected cars and trucks? Beyond concerns about location privacy, the intricate facets of this discourse warrant scholarly exploration, as the enduring appeal of these aquatic residences persists. This theme was also briefly addressed in one of the recent conferences at which I presented.

Exploring the Frontier of Green Intelligent Homes: My Presentation in Prague

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Photo by Capricious Wayfarer (Saptarshi) on Pexels.com

As we continue to embrace the benefits of smart technology, the concept of the Green Intelligent Home is an exciting and promising development in the evolution of smart homes. Our paper, which I presented at the IoTBDS conference in Prague last weekend, explores this frontier.

The possibilities of a world where Green Intelligent Homes are the norm are intriguing, as they offer increased automation, personalization, sustainability, and more. Nonetheless, as with any emerging technology, it is important to be aware of potential risks and implications. These range from security and privacy, manipulation of people, a lack of self-sufficiency, and more.    

As the Green Intelligent Home prospect continues to develop, it is essential to stay informed and explore the potential of this technology. In case you are interested in learning more about the Green Intelligent Home or collaborating on related projects, please get in touch.

The Matter Smart Home Standard

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Photo by John Tekeridis on Pexels.com

Matter is a royalty-free smart home standard that promotes platform and device interoperability. Built on the Internet Protocol, Matter enables communication across smart home devices and ecosystems over a variety of IP-based networking technologies, such as Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet.

The persistent need for an Internet connection experienced by modern IoT devices is likewise addressed by the Matter smart home standard. Indeed, Matter products run locally and do not rely on an Internet connection, although the standard is designed to readily communicate with the cloud.

Security is a fundamental premise of Matter. Matter functional security includes the following five characteristics:

  • Comprehensive – Matter is an open-source framework designed to provide comprehensive security with a layered approach that includes authentication, attestation, message protection and firmware updates, relying solely on its own security features and not on external communication protocols.
  • Strong – Matter implements a variety of security techniques, including a cryptosuite based on AES, SHA-256, and ECC, as well as passcode-based session and certificate-based establishment protocols. It also adopts device attestation and the CSA Distributed Compliance Ledger to guarantee a compliant and interoperable ecosystem.
  • Easy to use – Matter security is a smart device platform designed to make the implementation and use of smart devices much easier for device makers and consumers alike. It comes with open source reference implementations and well-defined security assets, making it a secure and simple solution for customers.
  • Resilient – Matter security is designed to protect, detect, and recover data, utilizing multiple protocols and measures to prevent denial of service attacks and provide resilience even when sleeping devices are involved.
  • Agile – Matter is a crypto-flexible protocol that abstracts cryptographic primitives, enabling the specification to be quickly changed or upgraded in response to new security threats. The modular design also allows for individual protocols to be replaced without completely overhauling the whole system.

Matter is paving the way for a secure and reliable connected home of the future. With its comprehensive security and ability to operate without an Internet connection, Matter is the ideal choice for modern IoT devices. It is revolutionizing the way home devices communicate, providing a safe and secure environment for the connected home of the future.

Read more here: https://csa-iot.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Matter_Security_and_Privacy_WP_March-2022.pdf and https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/

The future of luxury living is here, and it is floating

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Ocean Builders has just unveiled its fleet of revolutionary living pods, which bring together luxury living and smart home technology. The pods are currently under construction in the Linton Bay Marina on the north coast of Panama and are described as the “world’s first eco-restorative homes”.

Image source: https://oceanbuilders.com/ecopod/#ecopod-seapod

Some things, like food and medication, may be delivered by drones, while an autonomous vessel may be utilized as an ocean recycling vessel to collect waste and maintain a clean environment. The pods will also be equipped with special “smart rings” that enable residents to unlock doors and switch their music on at the wave of a hand.

Would you be interested in owning one of these homes? Do you think these homes are better equipped to safeguard our privacy and security? 

See the original article published on CNN Travel here: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/eco-friendly-futuristic-floating-homes-under-construction/index.html

Popular smart home brands may be allowing the police to conduct warrantless home surveillance

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The security cameras in our smart homes from well-known smart home brands like Amazon and Google might not just be watching over our pets. According to an article in The Verge, they can also aid law enforcement in their investigations of crimes, but only if we do not mind the police viewing our footage without a warrant.

That implies that the police can access our private information without first presenting proof that an emergency situation exists. Police will probably only make use of this access for lawful objectives, such as preventing crime or attempting to locate a missing person in need of assistance. However, it does raise some issues regarding what may transpire when this technology becomes even more widely used and available.

What if, for instance, this access is utilized to locate and detain activists or protestors who have not breached any laws? Citizens may only exercise caution when shopping, be aware that their smart device may record personal information, and, if possible, enable end-to-end encryption.

If you have any questions about how to secure your smart home, do not hesitate to contact me.

Is Your Home Giving Away Your Secrets?

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With an increasing number of companies providing consumers with their smart home products and related services, smart homes are quickly becoming the norm. This trend is likely to continue in the future, as more people are realizing the benefits of having a smart home.

Source: UR.se

Making a home smarter with sensing technologies can seem like a good idea, but it also gives attackers an opportunity to break into your devices and steal your personal data. This could be a problem for you and your family if you have smart devices in your home without having configured them properly or regularly updated them.

In a televised public lecture, I discuss the smart home, its privacy risks, and what can be done to secure the contemporary home. Here is the link to the full lecture: https://urplay.se/program/228807-ur-samtiden-malmoforskare-forelaser-avslojar-ditt-hem-dina-hemligheter

Special Issue on Privacy and Trust

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We are guest editing a Special Issue on Privacy and Trust in IoT-Based Smart Homes and Buildings, and would like to personally invite you to contribute a paper.

For this Special Issue we are looking for high-quality original contributions including, but not limited to, the topical areas listed below:

  • Novel architectures, concepts, and models for trustworthy smart homes and smart buildings;
  • Privacy-enhancing and transparency-enhancing technologies for smart homes and smart buildings;
  • Privacy-by-design mechanisms for smart homes and buildings;
  • Vulnerability discovery and analysis for smart homes and buildings;
  • Threat modeling and risk assessment for smart homes and buildings;
  • Attack and attacker simulation for smart homes and buildings;
  • Trust and identity management for smart homes and buildings;
  • Access control models for smart homes and buildings;
  • Human factors in privacy and security of smart homes and buildings.

Please spread the word!

More info: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors/special_issues/PT_SM

Keeping Your Smart Home Secure

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Smart homes are increasingly being subjected to attacks. The motives for this range from pranking users, causing chaos, cyberstalking, and more nefarious purposes. In spite of that, there are various strategies that residents can use to keep their home secure from intruders. In my latest article, I identify and discuss five of these strategies.

Check out the full article (in Swedish) by clicking here.

A full transcript in English is available to any interested reader.

Initiatives being brewed by governments to strengthen the IoT privacy and security

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Last week, I have been asked by several news reporters what can be done to have more secure and privacy-preserving smart home technologies. In this post, I focus on some of the more recent and upcoming regulations and initiatives that are affecting, and likely to affect it more in the future, the IoT world. Purposely, I exclude the EU GDPR  and its US counterpart the CCPA, as I will talk about those in a separate post.

  • The EU ePrivacy Regulation. This  EU regulation aims to ensure privacy in all electronic communications – including instant messaging apps and VoIP platforms, and machine-to-machine communications such as the IoT. Also, it carries an identical penalty regime for non-compliance as the GDPR.
  • The EU Cybersecurity Act. This establishes an EU-wide cybersecurity certification framework for digital products, services, and processes. This includes the IoT, cloud infrastructure and services, threat intelligence in the financial sector, electronic health records in healthcare, and qualified trust services.
  • The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020. This new US law establishes minimum security requirements for IoT devices owned or controlled by the federal government. Specifically, it requires any IoT devices purchased by the federal government to comply with the NIST standards and guidelines.

In the future, I will talk about some of the standards and best practice frameworks that can help organizations develop secure and privacy-preserving IoT technologies. Also, I will suggest some guidelines that consumers can adopt to secure their home devices.

Open-Source Smart Home Simulators

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Following, a blog post I have written in 2019 focusing on real smart home testbeds, a lot of readers have reached out asking me if I am aware of tools that can be used to simulate smart home data. I understand this request, because data collection in smart homes can be a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive process.  I identify three of the recent open-source tools that could be useful to simulate activity and human interactions within a smart home, below:

  • OpenSHS (Open Smart Home Simulator) [1]: This is a hybrid, open-source, cross-platform 3D smart home simulator, developed using Blender and Python, allowing for sophisticated dataset generation.

OpenSHS

Photo adopted from: https://github.com/openshs/openshs

  • Francillette et al. simulator [2]: The authors developed a smart environment simulator, using Java, SketchUp, and Unity engine, capable of generating data from simulated sensors such as RFID, ultrasound, pressure sensors, and contact sensors, amongst others.
  • Smart Environment Simulation (SESim) [3]: This is a simulation tool developed in Unity that supports smart home simulation and the generation of synthetic sensor datasets.

Also, in case you are a researcher and you would like a copy of the data I collected about the technical specifications of smart home products, feel free to get in touch.

[1] Alshammari, N.; Alshammari, T.; Sedky, M.; Champion, J.; Bauer, C. OpenSHS: Open Smart Home Simulator. Sensors 2017, 17, 1003. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17051003

[2]  Francillette, Y.; Boucher, E.; Bouzouane, A.; Gaboury, S. The Virtual Environment for Rapid Prototyping of the Intelligent Environment. Sensors 2017, 17, 2562. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17112562

[3] Brandon Ho, Dieter Vogts, and Janet Wesson. 2019. A Smart Home Simulation Tool to Support the Recognition of Activities of Daily Living. In: Proceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists 2019. ACM, Article 23, 1–10. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351108.3351132