GREEND: An Energy Consumption Dataset of Households in Italy and Austria

Home energy management systems can be used to monitor and optimize consumption and local production from renewable energy. To assess solutions before their deployment, researchers and designers of those systems demand for energy consumption datasets. In this paper, we present the GREEND dataset, containing detailed power usage information obtained through a measurement campaign in households in Austria and Italy. We provide a description of consumption scenarios and discuss design choices for the sensing infrastructure. Finally, we benchmark the dataset with state-of-the-art techniques in load disaggregation, occupancy detection and appliance usage mining

User Perceptions of Smart Home IoT Privacy

Smart home Internet of Things (IoT) devices are rapidly increasing in popularity, with more households including Internet-connected devices that continuously monitor user activities. In this study, we conduct eleven semi-structured interviews with smart home owners, investigating their reasons for purchasing IoT devices, perceptions of smart home privacy risks, and actions taken to protect their privacy from those external to the home who create, manage, track, or regulate IoT devices and/or their data. We note several recurring themes. First, users' desires for convenience and connectedness dictate their privacy-related behaviors for dealing with external entities, such as device manufacturers, Internet Service Providers, governments, and advertisers. Second, user opinions about external entities collecting smart home data depend on perceived benefit from these entities. Third, users trust IoT device manufacturers to protect their privacy but do not verify that these protections are in place. Fourth, users are unaware of privacy risks from inference algorithms operating on data from non-audio/visual devices. These findings motivate several recommendations for device designers, researchers, and industry standards to better match device privacy features to the expectations and preferences of smart home owners.Comment: 20 pages, 1 tabl

Multi-Layer Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience for Smart Grid

The smart grid is a large-scale complex system that integrates communication technologies with the physical layer operation of the energy systems. Security and resilience mechanisms by design are important to provide guarantee operations for the system. This chapter provides a layered perspective of the smart grid security and discusses game and decision theory as a tool to model the interactions among system components and the interaction between attackers and the system. We discuss game-theoretic applications and challenges in the design of cross-layer robust and resilient controller, secure network routing protocol at the data communication and networking layers, and the challenges of the information security at the management layer of the grid. The chapter will discuss the future directions of using game-theoretic tools in addressing multi-layer security issues in the smart grid.Comment: 16 page

Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund