Joseph Bugeja

This paper concerns the novel concept of an Interactive Dynamic Intelligent Virtual Sensor (IDIVS), which extends virtual/soft sensors towards making use of user input through interactive learning (IML) and transfer learning. In research, many studies can be found on using machine learning in this domain, but not much on using IML. This paper contributes by highlighting how this can be done and the associated positive potential effects and challenges. An IDIVS provides a sensor-like output and achieves the output through the data fusion of sensor values or from the output values of other IDIVSs. We focus on settings where people are present in different roles: from basic service users in the environment being sensed to interactive service users supporting the learning of the IDIVS, as well as configurators of the IDIVS and explicit IDIVS teachers. The IDIVS aims at managing situations where sensors may disappear and reappear and be of heterogeneous types. We refer to and recap the major findings from related experiments and validation in complementing work. Further, we point at several application areas: smart building, smart mobility, smart learning, and smart health. The information properties and capabilities needed in the IDIVS, with extensions towards information security, are introduced and discussed.

Smart homes promise to improve the quality of life of residents. However, they collect vasts amounts of personal and sensitive data, making privacy protection critically important. We propose a framework, called PRASH, for modeling and analyzing the privacy risks of smart homes. It is composed of three modules: a system model, a threat model, and a set of privacy metrics, which together are used for calculating the privacy risk exposure of a smart home system. By representing a smart home through a formal specification, PRASH allows for early identification of threats, better planning for risk management scenarios, and mitigation of potential impacts caused by attacks before they compromise the lives of residents. To demonstrate the capabilities of PRASH, an executable version of the smart home system configuration was generated using the proposed formal specification, which was then analyzed to find potential attack paths while also mitigating the impacts of those attacks. Thereby, we add important contributions to the body of knowledge on the mitigations of threat agents violating the privacy of users in their homes. Overall, the use of PRASH will help residents to preserve their right to privacy in the face of the emerging challenges affecting smart homes.

The growth and presence of heterogeneous sensor-equipped Internet-connected devices inside the home can increase efficiency and quality of life for the residents. Simultaneously, these devices continuously collect, process, and transmit data about the residents and their daily lifestyle activities to unknown parties outside the home. Such data can be sensitive and personal, leading to increasingly intimate insights into private lives. This data allows for the implementation of services, personalization support, and benefits offered by smart home technologies. Alas, there has been a surge of cyberattacks on connected home devices that essentially compromise privacy and security of the residents. Providing privacy and security is a critical issue in smart connected homes. Many residents are concerned about unauthorized access into their homes and about the privacy of their data. However, it is typically challenging to implement privacy and security in a smart connected home because of its heterogeneity of devices, the dynamic nature of the home network, and the fact that it is always connected to the Internet, amongst other things. As the numbers and types of smart home devices are increasing rapidly, so are the risks with these devices. Concurrently, it is also becoming increasingly challenging to gain a deeper understand- ing of the smart home. Such understanding is necessary to build a more privacy-preserving and secure smart connected home. Likewise, it is needed as a precursor to perform a comprehensive privacy and security analysis of the smart home. In this dissertation, we render a comprehensive description and account of the smart connected home that can be used for conducting risk analysis. In doing so, we organize the underlying smart home devices ac- cording to their functionality, identify their data-collecting capabilities, and survey the data types being collected by them. Such is done using the technical specification of commercial devices, including their privacy policies. This description is then leveraged for identifying threats and for analyzing risks present in smart connected homes. Such is done by analyzing both scholarly literature and examples from the industry, and leveraging formal modeling. Additionally, we identify malicious threat agents and mitigations that are relevant to smart connected homes. This is performed without limiting the research and results to a particular configuration and type of smart home. This research led to three main findings. First, the majority of the surveyed commercial devices are collecting instances of sensitive and personal data but are prone to critical vulnerabilities. Second, there is a shortage of scientific models that capture the complexity and heterogeneity of real-world smart home deployments, especially those intended for privacy risk analysis. Finally, despite the increasing regulations and attention to privacy and security, there is a lack of proactive and integrative approaches intended to safeguard privacy and security of the residents. We contributed to addressing these three findings by developing a framework and models that enable early identification of threats, better planning for risk management scenarios, and mitigation of potential impacts caused by attacks before they reach the homes and compromise the lives of the residents. Overall, the scientific contributions presented in this dissertation help deepen the understanding and reasoning about privacy and security concerns affecting smart connected homes, and contributes to advancing the research in the area of risk analysis as applied to such systems.

The growth and presence of heterogeneous sensor-equipped Internet-connected devices inside the home can increase efficiency and quality of life for the residents. Simultaneously, these devices continuously collect, process, and transmit data about the residents and their daily lifestyle activities to unknown parties outside the home. Such data can be sensitive and personal, leading to increasingly intimate insights into private lives. This data allows for the implementation of services, personalization support, and benefits offered by smart home technologies. Alas, there has been a surge of cyberattacks on connected home devices that essentially compromise privacy and security of the residents. Providing privacy and security is a critical issue in smart connected homes. Many residents are concerned about unauthorized access into their homes and about the privacy of their data. However, it is typically challenging to implement privacy and security in a smart connected home because of its heterogeneity of devices, the dynamic nature of the home network, and the fact that it is always connected to the Internet, amongst other things. As the numbers and types of smart home devices are increasing rapidly, so are the risks with these devices. Concurrently, it is also becoming increasingly challenging to gain a deeper understand- ing of the smart home. Such understanding is necessary to build a more privacy-preserving and secure smart connected home. Likewise, it is needed as a precursor to perform a comprehensive privacy and security analysis of the smart home. In this dissertation, we render a comprehensive description and account of the smart connected home that can be used for conducting risk analysis. In doing so, we organize the underlying smart home devices ac- cording to their functionality, identify their data-collecting capabilities, and survey the data types being collected by them. Such is done using the technical specification of commercial devices, including their privacy policies. This description is then leveraged for identifying threats and for analyzing risks present in smart connected homes. Such is done by analyzing both scholarly literature and examples from the industry, and leveraging formal modeling. Additionally, we identify malicious threat agents and mitigations that are relevant to smart connected homes. This is performed without limiting the research and results to a particular configuration and type of smart home. This research led to three main findings. First, the majority of the surveyed commercial devices are collecting instances of sensitive and personal data but are prone to critical vulnerabilities. Second, there is a shortage of scientific models that capture the complexity and heterogeneity of real-world smart home deployments, especially those intended for privacy risk analysis. Finally, despite the increasing regulations and attention to privacy and security, there is a lack of proactive and integrative approaches intended to safeguard privacy and security of the residents. We contributed to addressing these three findings by developing a framework and models that enable early identification of threats, better planning for risk management scenarios, and mitigation of potential impacts caused by attacks before they reach the homes and compromise the lives of the residents. Overall, the scientific contributions presented in this dissertation help deepen the understanding and reasoning about privacy and security concerns affecting smart connected homes, and contributes to advancing the research in the area of risk analysis as applied to such systems.

While security is often recognized as a top priority for organizations and a push for competitive advantage, repeatedly, Internet of Things (IoT) products have become a target of diverse security attacks. Thus, orchestrating smart services and devices in a more open, standardized and secure way in IoT environments is yet a desire as much as it is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a model for IoT practitioners and researchers, who can adopt a sound security thinking in parallel with open IoT technological developments. We present the state-of-the-art and an empirical study with IoT practitioners. These efforts have resulted in identifying a set of openness and security thinking criteria that are important to consider from an IoT ecosystem point of view. Openness in terms of open standards, data, APIs, processes, open source and open architectures (flexibility, customizability and extensibility aspects), by presenting security thinking tackled from a three-dimensional point of view (awareness, assessment and challenges) that highlight the need to develop an IoT security mindset. A novel model is conceptualized with those characteristics followed by several key aspects important to design and secure future IoT systems.

Smart connected home systems bring different privacy challenges to residents. The contribution of this paper is a novel privacy grounded classification of smart connected home systems that is focused on personal data exposure. This classification is built empirically through k-means cluster analysis from the technical specification of 81 commercial Internet of Things (IoT) systems as featured in PrivacyNotIncluded - an online database of consumer IoT systems. The attained classification helps us better understand the privacy implications and what is at stake with different smart connected home systems. Furthermore, we survey the entire spectrum of analyzed systems for their data collection capabilities. Systems were classified into four tiers: app-based accessors, watchers, location harvesters, and listeners, based on the sensing data the systems collect. Our findings indicate that being surveilled inside your home is a realistic threat, particularly, as the majority of the surveyed in-home IoT systems are installed with cameras, microphones, and location trackers. Finally, we identify research directions and suggest some best practices to mitigate the threat of in-house surveillance.

Smart connected homes are integrated with heterogeneous Internet-connected devices interacting with the physical environment and human users. While they have become an established research area, there is no common understanding of what composes such a pervasive environment making it challenging to perform a scientific analysis of the domain. This is especially evident when it comes to discourse about privacy threats. Recognizing this, we aim to describe a generic smart connected home, including the data it deals with in a novel privacy-centered system model. Such is done using concepts borrowed from the theory of Contextual Integrity. Furthermore, we represent privacy threats formally using the proposed model. To illustrate the usage of the model, we apply it to the design of an ambient-assisted living use-case and demonstrate how it can be used for identifying and analyzing the privacy threats directed to smart connected homes.