Surveillance Risks in IoT Applied to Smart Cities

With the advent of the IoT, proximity sensor devices are installed in many places in smart cities. Without any regulation or social policy, they could lead to a super-surveillance network managed by multi-agent systems in the future. Such networks may be able to reduce accidents, risks, damage and errors. However, they also pose high risk of surveillance and data breaches, including hacking attacks or malware intrusion. This research project is aimed at investigating the implications of IoT-driven surveillance in smart cities from privacy, data protection and ethical perspectives. The identification of the critical issues related to the extensive deployment of such sensing devices in the urban area will constitute a starting point for the development of a new regulatory framework for sensor-based surveillance in European Smart Cities. This new regulatory system shall be aimed at providing citizens with effective tools to exercise their rights to privacy and data protection when facing IoT-driven surveillance. Indeed, setting a clear set of rules governing big urban data processing shall be considered crucial to ensure a fair, democratic, human-centric development of smart cities in Europe

The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What are the Implications?

Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities

User-centric Privacy Engineering for the Internet of Things

User privacy concerns are widely regarded as a key obstacle to the success of modern smart cyber-physical systems. In this paper, we analyse, through an example, some of the requirements that future data collection architectures of these systems should implement to provide effective privacy protection for users. Then, we give an example of how these requirements can be implemented in a smart home scenario. Our example architecture allows the user to balance the privacy risks with the potential benefits and take a practical decision determining the extent of the sharing. Based on this example architecture, we identify a number of challenges that must be addressed by future data processing systems in order to achieve effective privacy management for smart cyber-physical systems.Comment: 12 Page

Securing the Participation of Safety-Critical SCADA Systems in the Industrial Internet of Things

In the past, industrial control systems were ‘air gapped’ and isolated from more conventional networks. They used specialist protocols, such as Modbus, that are very different from TCP/IP. Individual devices used proprietary operating systems rather than the more familiar Linux or Windows. However, things are changing. There is a move for greater connectivity – for instance so that higher-level enterprise management systems can exchange information that helps optimise production processes. At the same time, industrial systems have been influenced by concepts from the Internet of Things; where the information derived from sensors and actuators in domestic and industrial components can be addressed through network interfaces. This paper identifies a range of cyber security and safety concerns that arise from these developments. The closing sections introduce potential solutions and identify areas for future research

Challenges of Multi-Factor Authentication for Securing Advanced IoT (A-IoT) Applications

The unprecedented proliferation of smart devices together with novel communication, computing, and control technologies have paved the way for the Advanced Internet of Things~(A-IoT). This development involves new categories of capable devices, such as high-end wearables, smart vehicles, and consumer drones aiming to enable efficient and collaborative utilization within the Smart City paradigm. While massive deployments of these objects may enrich people's lives, unauthorized access to the said equipment is potentially dangerous. Hence, highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed. At the same time, human beings desire comfortable interaction with their owned devices on a daily basis, thus demanding the authentication procedures to be seamless and user-friendly, mindful of the contemporary urban dynamics. In response to these unique challenges, this work advocates for the adoption of multi-factor authentication for A-IoT, such that multiple heterogeneous methods - both well-established and emerging - are combined intelligently to grant or deny access reliably. We thus discuss the pros and cons of various solutions as well as introduce tools to combine the authentication factors, with an emphasis on challenging Smart City environments. We finally outline the open questions to shape future research efforts in this emerging field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. The work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Network, 2019. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

IoT for 5G/B5G applications in smart homes, smart cities, wearables and connected cars

Internet of things (IoT) is referred to as smart devices connected to the internet. A smart device is an electronic device, which may connect to other devices or are part of a network such as Wi-Fi. The increase of IoT devices has helped with advancing technology in many areas of society. Application of IoT in 5G/B5G devices has provided many benefits such as providing new ideas that can become projects for tech companies, generating big data (large volume of data which can be used to reveal trends, patterns and associations) and providing various ways of communicating. This has also had an impact on how companies improve their business with the use of advanced technology. However, the rapid growth of IoT has introduced a new platform for cybercriminals to attack. There has been published security measures on IoT to help deal with such risks and vulnerabilities. This survey paper will explore IoT in relation to smart homes, smart cities, wearables and connected cars. The benefits, risks and vulnerabilities will be discussed that comes along with using such devices connected to the internet

After the Gold Rush: The Boom of the Internet of Things, and the Busts of Data-Security and Privacy

This Article addresses the impact that the lack of oversight of the Internet of Things has on digital privacy. While the Internet of Things is but one vehicle for technological innovation, it has created a broad glimpse into domestic life, thus triggering several privacy issues that the law is attempting to keep pace with. What the Internet of Things can reveal is beyond the control of the individual, as it collects information about every practical aspect of an individual’s life, and provides essentially unfettered access into the mind of its users. This Article proposes that the federal government and the state governments bend toward consumer protection while creating a cogent and predictable body of law surrounding the Internet of Things. Through privacy-by-design or self-help, it is imperative that the Internet of Things—and any of its unforeseen progeny—develop with an eye toward safeguarding individual privacy while allowing technological development

Privacy, security and data protection in smart cities : a critical EU law perspective

"Smart cities" are a buzzword of the moment. Although legal interest is growing, most academic responses at least in the EU, are still from the technological, urban studies, environmental and sociological rather than legal, sectors and have primarily laid emphasis on the social, urban, policing and environmental benefits of smart cities, rather than their challenges, in often a rather uncritical fashion . However a growing backlash from the privacy and surveillance sectors warns of the potential threat to personal privacy posed by smart cities . A key issue is the lack of opportunity in an ambient or smart city environment for the giving of meaningful consent to processing of personal data; other crucial issues include the degree to which smart cities collect private data from inevitable public interactions, the "privatisation" of ownership of both infrastructure and data, the repurposing of “big data” drawn from IoT in smart cities and the storage of that data in the Cloud. This paper, drawing on author engagement with smart city development in Glasgow as well as the results of an international conference in the area curated by the author, argues that smart cities combine the three greatest current threats to personal privacy, with which regulation has so far failed to deal effectively; the Internet of Things(IoT) or "ubiquitous computing"; "Big Data" ; and the Cloud. It seeks solutions both from legal institutions such as data protection law and from "code", proposing in particular from the ethos of Privacy by Design, a new "social impact assessment" and new human:computer interactions to promote user autonomy in ambient environments