Internet-of-Things (IoT) are everywhere in our daily life. They are used in our homes, in hospitals, deployed outside to control and report the changes in environment, prevent fires, and many more beneficial functionality. However, all those benefits can come of huge risks of privacy loss and security issues. To secure the IoT devices, many research works have been conducted to countermeasure those problems and find a better way to eliminate those risks, or at least minimize their effects on the user’s privacy and security requirements. The survey consists of four segments. The first segment will explore the most relevant limitations of IoT devices and their solutions. The second one will present the classification of IoT attacks. The next segment will focus on the mechanisms and architectures for authentication and access control. The last segment will analyze the security issues in different layers.

A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues in Internet-of-Things

While the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving a transformation of current society toward a smarter one, new challenges and opportunities have arisen to accommodate the demands of IoT development. Low power wireless devices are, undoubtedly, the most viable solution for diverse IoT use cases. Among such devices, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons have emerged as one of the most promising due to the ubiquity of Bluetooth-compatible devices, such as iPhones and Android smartphones. However, for BLE beacons to continue penetrating the IoT ecosystem in a holistic manner, interdisciplinary research is needed to ensure seamless integration. This paper consolidates the information on the state-of-the-art BLE beacon, from its application and deployment cases, hardware requirements, and casing design to its software and protocol design, and it delivers a timely review of the related research challenges. In particular, the BLE beacon’s cutting-edge applications, the interoperability between packet profiles, the reliability of its signal detection and distance estimation methods, the sustainability of its low energy, and its deployment constraints are discussed to identify research opportunities and directions.

BLE Beacons for Internet of Things Applications: Survey, Challenges, and Opportunities

The present electric power system structure has lasted for decades; it is still partially proprietary, energy-inefficient, physically and virtually (or cyber) insecure, as well as prone to power transmission congestion and consequent failures. Recent efforts in building a smart grid system have focused on addressing the problems of global warming effects, rising energy-hungry demands, and risks of peak loads. One of the major goals of the new system is to effectively regulate energy usage by utilizing the backbone of the prospectively deployed Automatic Meter Reading (AMR), Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI), and Demand Response (DR) programs via the advanced distribution automation and dynamic pricing models. The function of the power grid is no longer a system that only supplies energy to end users, but also allows consumers to contribute their clean energy back to the grid in the future. In the meantime, communications networks in the electric power infrastructure enact critical roles. Intelligent automation proposed in smart grid projects include the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition/Energy Management Systems (SCADA/EMS) and Phasor Management Units (PMU) in transmission networks, as well as the AMR/AMI associated with field/neighborhood area networks (FAN/NAN) and home area networks (HAN) at the distribution and end-use levels. This article provides an overview of the essentials of the progressive smart grid paradigm and integration of different communications technologies for the legacy power system. Additionally, foreseeable issues and challenges in designing communications networks for the smart grid system are also rigorously deliberated in this paper.

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The Progressive Smart Grid System from Both Power and Communications Aspects

The recent worldwide measures for energy savings call for a larger awareness of the household energy consumption, given the relevant contribution of domestic load to the national energy balance. On the other hand, electricity smart meters together with gas, heat, and water meters can be interconnected in a large network offering a potential value to implement energy savings and other energy-related services, as long as an efficient interface with the final user is implemented. Unfortunately, so far, the interface of such devices is mostly designed and addressed at the utilities supervising the system, giving them relevant advantages, while the communication with the household is often underestimated. This paper addresses this topic by proposing the definition of a local interface for smart meters, by looking at the actual European Union and international regulations, at the technological solutions available on the market, and at those implemented in different countries, and, finally, by proposing specific architectures for a proper consumer-oriented implementation of a smart meter network.

Electricity Smart Meters Interfacing the Households

This review presents the state of the art of the application of energy harvesting in commercial and residential buildings. Electromagnetic (optical and radio frequency), kinetic, thermal and airflow-based energy sources are identified as potential energy sources within buildings and the available energy is measured in a range of buildings. Suitable energy harvesters are discussed and the available and the potential harvested energy calculated. Calculations based on these measurements, and the technical specifications of state-of-the-art harvesters, show that typical harvested powers are: (1) indoor solar cell (active area of 9 cm2, volume of 2.88 cm3): ~300 µW from a light intensity of 1000 lx; (2) thermoelectric harvester (volume of 1.4 cm3): 6 mW from a thermal gradient of 25 °C; (3) periodic kinetic energy harvester (volume of 0.15 cm3): 2 µW from a vibration acceleration of 0.25 m s−2 at 45 Hz; (4) electromagnetic wave harvester (13 cm antenna length and conversion efficiency of 0.7): 1 µW with an RF source power of −25 dBm; and (5) airflow harvester (wind turbine blade of 6 cm diameter and generator efficiency of 0.41): 140 mW from an airflow of 8 m s−1. These results highlight the high potential of energy harvesting technology in buildings and the relative attractions of various harvester technologies. The harvested power could either be used to replace batteries or to prolong the life of rechargeable batteries for low-power (~1 mW) electronic devices.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0957-0233/25/1/012002/pdf

Review of the application of energy harvesting in buildings

In recent years, the home environment has seen a rapid introduction of network enabled digital technology. This technology offers new and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of devices within the home for the purpose of home automation. Moreover, with the rapid expansion of the Internet, there is the added potential for the remote control and monitoring of such network enabled devices. However, the adoption of home automation systems has been slow. This paper identifies the reasons for this slow adoption and evaluates the potential of ZigBee for addressing these problems through the design and implementation of a flexible home automation architecture. A ZigBee based home automation system and Wi-Fi network are integrated through a common home gateway. The home gateway provides network interoperability, a simple and flexible user interface, and remote access to the system. A dedicated virtual home is implemented to cater for the system's security and safety needs. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system, four devices, a light switch, radiator valve, safety sensor and ZigBee remote control have been developed and evaluated with the home automation system.

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A zigbee-based home automation system

The rapid consumer adoption of high-speed internet connections has lead to the unprecedented interconnection of home networks Consequently, the number of domestic home automation networks offering internet connectivity has increased These home automation networks are increasingly comprised of resource limited wireless sensor networks (WSN) This creates the potential for malicious users from across the internet to attack these resource-limited WSN One such threat is that of a denial of service (DoS) attack Due to the resource-limited nature of WSN, a DoS attack may disrupt communications on the WSN or block remote access to the WSN The existing DoS defence approaches are generic approaches aimed at processing and filtering all internet traffic to remove suspected DoS attack traffic However, these approaches are not capable of filtering out all attack traffic, instead a small amount of attack traffic reaches the attackers intended victim This small level of attack traffic poses a significant threat to the limited resources of WSN This paper reviews the design and implementation of a novel defence strategy designed to work alongside existing DoS counter measures to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings

A scheme for preventing denial of service attacks on wireless sensor networks

Recent developments in the field of home automation have shifted the technology away from the realms of research and into the homes of consumers. Together with the rapid adoption of the Internet, the `anywhere and anytime' accessible home environment has been brought closer to a reality. Exciting as this prospect might be, significant security challenges arise from making the home environment accessible to anyone with Internet access. Hence, providing sufficient security to offer a reasonable level of protection for homeowner's privacy and safety is crucial for successful adoption of this technology. This study examines the security issues raised by the `anywhere and anytime' accessible home environment. The existing approaches for addressing these security challenges and their weaknesses are reviewed. This study concludes with the proposal, implementation and evaluation of an improved approach for providing remote access security for the home environment.

Secure remote access to home automation networks

Home environment has seen a rapid introduction of network technologies. The types of home networks introduced, include home automation, multimedia entertainment, and security networks. These networks are often developed by different organisations and consist of varying network technologies. Consequently, little attention has been given to the coexistence and interoperability of these networks. This naturally developing heterogeneous network architecture introduces new and significant usability and safety concerns. This paper addresses these concerns, through the design and implementation of a home gateway. A case study is implemented showing the application of the home gateway, to facilitate interoperability, between a home automation and a video surveillance network.

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Transparent Heterogeneous Networks for Remote Control of Home Environments

Remote access to home automation systems (HASs) through the Internet creates the potential for malicious users from across the Internet to attack the HASs. One such threat is that of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that may disrupt communications or block remote access to the HASs. Existing approaches for DoS defence are generic and are not capable of filtering out all attack traffic, so a small amount of attack traffic reaches an HAS. This small level of attack traffic poses a significant threat to the HAS that are increasingly comprised of resource-limited wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This study proposes implements and evaluates a novel defence strategy designed to work alongside existing approaches for DoS defence to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings. The proposed defence strategy consists of three entities, the virtual home, remote home server and DoS defence server. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy can filter low-level attack traffic and thereby protect low-resource networks, such as WSN-based HASs.

Khusvinder Gill

Papers

A zigbee-based home automation system

A scheme for preventing denial of service attacks on wireless sensor networks

Secure remote access to home automation networks

Transparent Heterogeneous Networks for Remote Control of Home Environments

Scheme for preventing low-level denial-of-service attacks on wireless sensor network-based home automation systems