The smart home technology market is witnessing rapid growth due to the advent of more advanced, intuitive, and affordable solutions. As the adoption of these technologies becomes more prevalent, there is a need for research to explore potential avenues for pervasive smart living. This study aims to review the available literature and industry studies, along with our own experiences in the field, to identify and discuss potential future research in the smart home. We observe that the future of the smart home will likely be focused on improving the user experience, with a greater emphasis on personalization, automation, and Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies, leading to what we call the "Green Intelligent Home". Through this analysis, this study aims to offer insights into how the development of smart homes could shape society in the future and the potential implications of such a development. This study concludes by suggesting a framework for knowledge development in the smart home domain.

The conveniences of remote work are various, but a surge in cyberthreats has heavily affected the optimal processes of organizations. As a result, employees’ cybersecurity awareness was jeopardized, prompting organizations to require improvement of cybersecurity processes at all levels. This paper explores which cybersecurity aspects are more relevant and/or relatable for remote working employees. A qualitative approach via interviews is used to collect experiences and perspectives from employees in different organizations. The results show that human factors, such as trust in cybersecurity infrastructure, previous practices, training, security fatigue, and improvements with gamification, are core to supporting the success of a cybersecurity program in a remote work environment.

This paper concerns the novel concept of an Interactive Dynamic Intelligent Virtual Sensor (IDIVS), which extends virtual/soft sensors towards making use of user input through interactive learning (IML) and transfer learning. In research, many studies can be found on using machine learning in this domain, but not much on using IML. This paper contributes by highlighting how this can be done and the associated positive potential effects and challenges. An IDIVS provides a sensor-like output and achieves the output through the data fusion of sensor values or from the output values of other IDIVSs. We focus on settings where people are present in different roles: from basic service users in the environment being sensed to interactive service users supporting the learning of the IDIVS, as well as configurators of the IDIVS and explicit IDIVS teachers. The IDIVS aims at managing situations where sensors may disappear and reappear and be of heterogeneous types. We refer to and recap the major findings from related experiments and validation in complementing work. Further, we point at several application areas: smart building, smart mobility, smart learning, and smart health. The information properties and capabilities needed in the IDIVS, with extensions towards information security, are introduced and discussed.

A major concern in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in general is their reliability in the presence of security threats and cyberattacks. Particularly, there is a growing recognition that IoT environments featuring virtual sensing and interactive machine learning may be subject to additional vulnerabilities when compared to traditional networks and classical batch learning settings. Partly, this is as adversaries could more easily manipulate the user feedback channel with malicious content. To this end, we propose a data-centric anomaly-based detection system, based on machine learning, that facilitates the process of identifying anomalies, particularly those related to poisoning integrity attacks targeting the user feedback channel of interactive machine learning setups. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed system in a case study involving a smart campus setup consisting of different smart devices, namely, a smart camera, a climate sensmitter, smart lighting, a smart phone, and a user feedback channel over which users could furnish labels to improve detection of correct system states, namely, activity types happening inside a room. Our results indicate that anomalies targeting the user feedback channel can be accurately detected at 98% using the Random Forest classifier.

Remote health monitoring is a trend for better health management which necessitates the need for secure monitoring and privacy-preservation of patient data. Moreover, accurate and continuous monitoring of personal health status may require expert validation in an active learning strategy. As a result, this paper proposes a Federated Interactive Learning IoT-based Health Monitoring Platform (FIL-IoT-HMP) which incorporates multi-expert feedback as ‘Human-in-the-loop’ in an active learning strategy in order to improve the clients’ Machine Learning (ML) models. The authors have proposed an architecture and conducted an experiment as a proof of concept. Federated learning approach has been preferred in this context given that it strengthens privacy by allowing the global model to be trained while sensitive data is retained at the local edge nodes. Also, each model’s accuracy is improved while privacy and security of data has been upheld.

Drones have been discussed frequently in both governmental and commercial sectors for their normalization in the airspace. Nonetheless, drones bring diverse privacy concerns to users. In this paper, we explore the ramifications to data privacy from the perspective of drone owners. To investigate privacy in this context, four experiments targeting a commercial drone were conducted using open-source software. The experiments identified personal data (e.g., audio, video, and location) that are at risk of being compromised particularly through the execution of a basic deauthentication attack launched at a commercial drone. Our findings indicate the severity of risks affecting commercial drones. This makes the case for more effective privacy regulations and better guidelines suitable for securing drones.

The growth and presence of heterogeneous sensor-equipped Internet-connected devices inside the home can increase efficiency and quality of life for the residents. Simultaneously, these devices continuously collect, process, and transmit data about the residents and their daily lifestyle activities to unknown parties outside the home. Such data can be sensitive and personal, leading to increasingly intimate insights into private lives. This data allows for the implementation of services, personalization support, and benefits offered by smart home technologies. Alas, there has been a surge of cyberattacks on connected home devices that essentially compromise privacy and security of the residents.

Providing privacy and security is a critical issue in smart connected homes. Many residents are concerned about unauthorized access into their homes and about the privacy of their data. However, it is typically challenging to implement privacy and security in a smart connected home because of its heterogeneity of devices, the dynamic nature of the home network, and the fact that it is always connected to the Internet, amongst other things. As the numbers and types of smart home devices are increasing rapidly, so are the risks with these devices. Concurrently, it is also becoming increasingly challenging to gain a deeper understand- ing of the smart home. Such understanding is necessary to build a more privacy-preserving and secure smart connected home. Likewise, it is needed as a precursor to perform a comprehensive privacy and security analysis of the smart home.

In this dissertation, we render a comprehensive description and account of the smart connected home that can be used for conducting risk analysis. In doing so, we organize the underlying smart home devices ac- cording to their functionality, identify their data-collecting capabilities, and survey the data types being collected by them. Such is done using the technical specification of commercial devices, including their privacy policies. This description is then leveraged for identifying threats and for analyzing risks present in smart connected homes. Such is done by analyzing both scholarly literature and examples from the industry, and leveraging formal modeling. Additionally, we identify malicious threat agents and mitigations that are relevant to smart connected homes. This is performed without limiting the research and results to a particular configuration and type of smart home.

This research led to three main findings. First, the majority of the surveyed commercial devices are collecting instances of sensitive and personal data but are prone to critical vulnerabilities. Second, there is a shortage of scientific models that capture the complexity and heterogeneity of real-world smart home deployments, especially those intended for privacy risk analysis. Finally, despite the increasing regulations and attention to privacy and security, there is a lack of proactive and integrative approaches intended to safeguard privacy and security of the residents. We contributed to addressing these three findings by developing a framework and models that enable early identification of threats, better planning for risk management scenarios, and mitigation of potential impacts caused by attacks before they reach the homes and compromise the lives of the residents.

Overall, the scientific contributions presented in this dissertation help deepen the understanding and reasoning about privacy and security concerns affecting smart connected homes, and contributes to advancing the research in the area of risk analysis as applied to such systems.

Smart homes promise to improve the quality of life of residents. However, they collect vasts amounts of personal and sensitive data, making privacy protection critically important. We propose a framework, called PRASH, for modeling and analyzing the privacy risks of smart homes. It is composed of three modules: a system model, a threat model, and a set of privacy metrics, which together are used for calculating the privacy risk exposure of a smart home system. By representing a smart home through a formal specification, PRASH allows for early identification of threats, better planning for risk management scenarios, and mitigation of potential impacts caused by attacks before they compromise the lives of residents. To demonstrate the capabilities of PRASH, an executable version of the smart home system configuration was generated using the proposed formal specification, which was then analyzed to find potential attack paths while also mitigating the impacts of those attacks. Thereby, we add important contributions to the body of knowledge on the mitigations of threat agents violating the privacy of users in their homes. Overall, the use of PRASH will help residents to preserve their right to privacy in the face of the emerging challenges affecting smart homes.

Smart connected homes are integrated with heterogeneous Internet-connected devices interacting with the physical environment and human users. While they have become an established research area, there is no common understanding of what composes such a pervasive environment making it challenging to perform a scientific analysis of the domain. This is especially evident when it comes to discourse about privacy threats. Recognizing this, we aim to describe a generic smart connected home, including the data it deals with in a novel privacy-centered system model. Such is done using concepts borrowed from the theory of Contextual Integrity. Furthermore, we represent privacy threats formally using the proposed model. To illustrate the usage of the model, we apply it to the design of an ambient-assisted living use-case and demonstrate how it can be used for identifying and analyzing the privacy threats directed to smart connected homes.