Biblio

Nowadays, smart home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home have reached mainstream popularity.
Being in the homes of users, these devices are intrinsically intrusive, being able to access details such as users' name, gender, home address, calendar appointments and others.
There are growing concerns about indiscriminate data collection and invasion of user privacy in smart home devices, but studies show that perceived benefits are exceeding perceived risks when it comes to consumers.
As a result, consumers are placing a lot of trust in these devices, sometimes without realizing it.
Improper trust assumptions and security controls can lead to unauthorized access and control of the devices, which can result in serious consequences.
In this paper, we explore the behaviour of devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home in a smart home setting with respect to trust relationships and propose a trust model to improve these relationships among all the involved actors.
We have evaluated how trust was built and managed from the initial set up phase to the normal operation phase, during which we performed a number of interaction tests with different types of users (i.e. owner, guests).
As a result, we were able to assess the effectiveness of the provided security controls and identify potential relevant security issues.  In order to address the identified issues, we defined a trust model and propose a solution based on it for further securing smart home systems.

In recent times, smart home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home have reached mainstream popularity. These devices are intrinsically intrusive, being able to access user’s personal information. There are growing concerns about indiscriminate data collection and invasion of user privacy in smart home devices. Improper trust assumptions and security controls can lead to unauthorized access of the devices, which can have severe consequences (i.e. safety risks). In this paper, we analysed the behaviour of smart home devices with respect to trust relationships. We set up a smart home environment to evaluate how trust is built and managed. Then, we performed a number of interaction tests with different types of users (i.e. owner, guests). As a result, we were able to assess the effectiveness of the provided security controls and identify some relevant security issues. To address them, we defined a trust model and proposed a solution based on it for securing smart home devices.

Cloud sourcing consists of outsourcing data, services and infrastructure to cloud providers. Even when this outsourcing model brings advantages to cloud customers, new threats also arise as sensitive data and critical IT services are beyond customers' control. When an organization considers moving to the cloud, IT decision makers must select a cloud provider and must decide which parts of the organization will be outsourced and to which extent. This paper proposes a methodology that allows decision makers to evaluate their trust in cloud providers. The methodology provides a systematic way to elicit knowledge about cloud providers, quantify their trust factors and aggregate them into trust values that can assist the decision-making process. The trust model that we propose is based on trust intervals, which allow capturing uncertainty during the evaluation, and we define an operator for aggregating these trust intervals. The methodology is applied to an eHealth scenario.

 Temporal logics of knowledge are useful for reasoning about situations where the knowledge of an agent or component is important, and where change in this knowledge may occur over time. Here we investigate the application of temporal logics of knowledge to the specification and verification of security protocols. We show how typical assumptions relating to authentication protocols can be specified. We consider verification methods for these logics, in particular, focusing on proofs using clausal resolution. Finally we present experiences from using a resolution based theorem prover applied to security protocols specified in temporal logics of knowledge.

The realization of the Ambient Intelligence concept entails many important challenges, but the most important barriers to this realization is the lack of adequate support for security. In this paper we present a conceptual model of our solution for building secure systems for AmI environments, taking as basis the concept of Security and Dependability (S&D) Pattern as a precise representation of validated S&D solutions and mechanisms. The main elements embedded in our solution framework (S&D library, monitoring interface and S&D Manager) are presented both conceptually, and also using a simple example scenario based on an hospital AmI environment.