Securing Our Future Homes: Smart Home Security Issues and Solutions

The Internet of Things, commonly known as IoT, is a new technology transforming businesses, individuals’ daily lives and the operation of entire countries. With more and more devices becoming equipped with IoT technology, smart homes are becoming increasingly popular. The components that make up a smart home are at risk for different types of attacks; therefore, security engineers are developing solutions to current problems and are predicting future types of attacks. This paper will analyze IoT smart home components, explain current security risks, and suggest possible solutions. According to “What is a Smart Home” (n.d.), a smart home is a home that always operates in consideration of security, energy, efficiency and convenience, whether anyone is home or not

An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations

With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter, we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and some of their counter measures are also presented

A Survey of Techniques for Improving Security of GPUs

Graphics processing unit (GPU), although a powerful performance-booster, also has many security vulnerabilities. Due to these, the GPU can act as a safe-haven for stealthy malware and the weakest `link' in the security `chain'. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for analyzing and improving GPU security. We classify the works on key attributes to highlight their similarities and differences. More than informing users and researchers about GPU security techniques, this survey aims to increase their awareness about GPU security vulnerabilities and potential countermeasures

Biometric encryption system for increased security

Security is very important in present day life. In this highly-interconnected world, most of our daily activities are computer based, and the data transactions are protected by passwords. These passwords identify various entities such as bank accounts, mobile phones, etc. People might reuse the same password, or passwords related to an individual that can lead to attacks. Indeed, remembering several passwords can become a tedious task. Biometrics is a science that measures an individual’s physical characteristics in a unique way. Thus, biometrics serves as a method to replace the cumbersome use of complex passwords. Our research uses the features of biometrics to efficiently implement a biometric encryption system with a high level of security

IMG-GUARD: Watermark Based Approach for Image Privacy in OSN Framework

A social networking service (also social networking site, SNS or social media) is an online platform that is used by people to build social networks or social relations with another persons who are share their own details or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. Social networking sites are varied and they incorporate a range of new information and various tools such as availability personal computers, mobile devices such as tablet computers and smart phones, digital photo/video/sharing and "web logging" diary entries online (blogging). While Online Social Networks (OSNs) enable users to share photos easily, they also expose users to several privacy threats from both the OSNs and external entities. The current privacy controls on social networks are far from adequate, resulting in inappropriate flows of information when users fail to understand their privacy settings or OSNs fail to implement policies correctly. Social networks may be complicated because of privacy expectations when they reserve the right to analyze uploaded photos using automated watermarking technique. A user who uploads digital data such as image to their home page may wish to share it with only mutual friends, which OSNs partially satisfy with privacy settings. In this paper, we concentrate to solve the privacy violation problem occurred when images are published on the online social networks without the permission. According to such images are always shared after uploading process. Therefore, the digital image watermarking based on DWT co-efficient. Watermark bits are embedded in uploaded images. Watermarked images are shared in user homages can be difficult to misuse by other persons

Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Media Search

International audienceThis work proposes a privacy-protection framework for an important application called outsourced media search. This scenario involves a data owner, a client, and an untrusted server, where the owner outsources a search service to the server. Due to lack of trust, the privacy of the client and the owner should be protected. The framework relies on multimedia hashing and symmetric encryption. It requires involved parties to participate in a privacy-enhancing protocol. Additional processing steps are carried out by the owner and the client: (i) before outsourcing low-level media features to the server, the owner has to one-way hash them, and partially encrypt each hash-value; (ii) the client completes the similarity search by re-ranking the most similar candidates received from the server. One-way hashing and encryption add ambiguity to data and make it difficult for the server to infer contents from database items and queries, so the privacy of both the owner and the client is enforced. The proposed framework realizes trade-offs among strength of privacy enforcement, quality of search, and complexity, because the information loss can be tuned during hashing and encryption. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and the flexibility of the framework