Securing the smart home: A real case study

Abstract

Both people and organizations are widely accepting and adopting of the functionalities offered by the smart home or smart building applications. This is due to the many advantages, in easing users' everyday life and work, provided by the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and devices—equipped with sensors, cameras, or actuators—and the ability to either to acquire information from the environment or to perform proper tasks. The main features of smart homes/buildings include real‐time monitoring, remote control, safety from intruders, gas/fire alarm, and so on. Because sensitive and private information is managed within smart homes/buildings, security and privacy solutions must be put in place in order to protect users/businesses' data against violation attempts as well as to guarantee the provision of reliable services. To this end, rules—in the form of policies—associated with the smart home/building resources must be defined and correctly enforced by means of a robust framework for handling the huge amount of IoT data managed. In this paper, the effectiveness and potentialities of a strategy based on sticky policies, integrated into a security and privacy‐aware IoT middleware, are demonstrated within a smart home scenario. A test bed is developed using real datasets in order to conduct analysis on the execution times, response times to detected attacks, and memory occupancy of the proposed approach.

Smart Homes: Security Challenges and Privacy Concerns

“…This dynamic network setup opens the smart home to a greater threat landscape, with a much larger attack surface area. Devices will interact through different means, will transport and store data in different locations and will have different levels of security hardness [11].…”

How to evaluate an Internet of Things system: Models, case studies, and real developments

“…Other solutions strictly regard smart buildings, which mainly include smart homes and smart offices. The work of Sicari et al uses real data sets, collected from existing smart homes (reporting information such as energy consumption and lighting), for testing a middleware conceived to evaluate the security of the information transmitted within the underlying IoT infrastructure. The middleware runs on Raspberry Pi, and it is implemented in Node.js, whereas JSON formal language and MongoDB database are used for data exchanging and storage, respectively.…”

“…Another test‐bed consisting of a Raspberry Pi is detailed in the work of La Marra et al Furthermore, here, the final goal is to evaluate a security protocol for enforcing the usage control policies. In both the cases (ie, the works of Sicari et al and La Marra et al) the test‐beds consist of a limited number of devices, thus preventing to conduct relevant considerations about the scalability of the proposed approaches.…”

“…Hence, the scope of our evaluation and of that proposed by the SmartSantander platform is totally different: the former represents a higher level methodology to evaluate new solutions and data flows' management before real deployment, whereas the latter aims at practically deploying the conceived solution in real environments. Note that the other approaches, mentioned in Section 2.1, do not provide any simulation or test‐bed to verify the envisioned functionalities; but it is fundamental to propose new architectures and methodologies inspired to IoT principles, as we do by means of Node‐RED. With respect to the works presented in Section 2.2, some of them tried to test the proposed smart home systems by means of real test‐beds . The main drawback is that such test‐beds, due to their limited dimension, do not allow to perform a preliminary evaluation about the scalability of the architecture's entities and interactions.…”

Open-Source Electronics Platforms as Enabling Technologies for Smart Cities: Recent Developments and Perspectives

“…The availability of open-source prototyping and development platforms has the potential to deeply change the way IoT applications are created and this trend became even more striking with the release of some popular electronics platforms. Although there is a great appeal around these platforms for DIY (Do-It-Yourself) applications, with a lot of projects in the "Smart Home" domain [19,[29][30][31], different types of IoT applications can be designed. Nowadays, the development of smart-city systems based on such platforms is a reasonable and inexpensive choice for many projects.…”