Weathering the Nest: Privacy Implications of Home Monitoring for the Aging American Population

The research in this paper will seek to ascertain the extent of personal data entry and collection required to enjoy at least the minimal promised benefits of distributed intelligence and monitoring in the home. Particular attention will be given to the abilities and sensitivities of the population most likely to need these devices, notably the elderly and disabled. The paper will then evaluate whether existing legal limitations on the collection, maintenance, and use of such data are applicable to devices currently in use in the home environment and whether such regulations effectively protect privacy. Finally, given appropriate policy parameters, the paper will offer proposals to effectuate reasonable and practical privacy-protective solutions for developers and consumers

Simple and secured access to networked home appliances via internet using SSL, BioHashing and single Authentication Server

This thesis describes a web-based application that will enable users to access their networked home appliances over the Internet in an easy, secured, accessible and cost effective manner, using the user's iris image only for authentication. As Internet is increasingly gaining significance and popularity in our daily lives, various home networking technologies also started gaining importance from consumers, which helped in facilitating interoperability, sharing of services and exchange of information between different electronic devices at home. As a result, the demand to be able to access home appliances or security cameras over the Internet gradually grew. In this research, we propose an efficient, secured, low-cost and user-friendly method to access networked home appliances over the Internet, providing strong, well integrated, three levels of security to the whole application and user data. According to our design, the user's iris data after hashing (using BioHashing) is sent through a secure communication channel utilizing Secure Sockets Layer v-3.0. The deterministic feature sequence from the iris image is extracted using 1D log-Gabor filters and while performing BioHashing, the orthonormalization of the pseudorandom number is implemented employing Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization algorithm. In addition to this protected data transfer mechanism, we propose the design of an Authentication Server that can be shared among multiple homes, allowing numerous users to access their home appliances in a trouble-free and secured manner. It can also bring down the cost of commercial realization of this endeavor and increase its accessibility without compromising on system security. We demonstrate that the recognition efficiency of this system is computationally effective with equal error rate (EER) of 0% and 6.75% (average) in two separate conditions on CASIA 1 and CASIA 2 iris image datasets

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

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

Security in smart home environment

This chapter presents the concept of Smart Home, describes the Smart Home networking technologies and discusses the main issues for ensuring security in a Smart Home environment. Nowadays, the integration of current communication and information technologies within the dwelling has led to the emergence of Smart Homes. These technologies facilitate the building of Smart Home environments in which devices and systems can communicate with each other and can be controlled automatically in order to interact with the household members and improve the quality of their life. However, the nature of Smart Home environment, the fact that it is always connected to the outside world via Internet and the open security back doors derived from the household members raise many security concerns. Finally, by reviewing the existing literature regarding Smart Homes and security issues that exist in Smart Home environments, the authors envisage to provide a base to broaden the research in Smart Home security

Pervasive Biometric Authentication in the Smart Home Based on Integrated Light Fingerprint Pads

As virtual voice-enabled assistants and other smart devices continue to evolve, it is becoming increasingly important to authenticate users before the assistant or device carries out a task. For example, if the assistant is going to make a purchase on the user\u27s behalf, it is important that the assistant can verify the right user is making the request. However, in some circumstances, it is inconvenient, difficult, and unreliable for virtual voice-enabled assistants to authenticate users

A user-centric privacy-preserving authentication protocol for IoT-AmI environments

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Internet of Things (IoT) has empowered healthcare professionals to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Besides, the AmI-IoT has improved patient engagement and gratification as doctors’ interactions have become more comfortable and efficient. However, the benefits of the AmI-IoT-based healthcare applications are not availed entirely due to the adversarial threats. IoT networks are prone to cyber attacks due to vulnerable wireless mediums and the absentia of lightweight and robust security protocols. This paper introduces computationally-inexpensive privacy-assuring authentication protocol for AmI-IoT healthcare applications. The use of blockchain & fog computing in the protocol guarantees unforgeability, non-repudiation, transparency, low latency, and efficient bandwidth utilization. The protocol uses physically unclonable functions (PUF), biometrics, and Ethereum powered smart contracts to prevent replay, impersonation, and cloning attacks. Results prove the resource efficiency of the protocol as the smart contract incurs very minimal gas and transaction fees. The Scyther results validate the robustness of the proposed protocol against cyber-attacks. The protocol applies lightweight cryptography primitives (Hash, PUF) instead of conventional public-key cryptography and scalar multiplications. Consequently, the proposed protocol is better than centralized infrastructure-based authentication approaches