Smart Home with Resilience Against Cloud Disconnection
Date
2018-09-17
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Abstract
Kevin Aston, one who coined the term, described Internet of Things (IoT) as computers that knew everything there was to know about things. Having such computers enable us to use the data to track and count everything, which results in huge reduction of waste and cost. A smart home is equipped with hundreds of sensors that perform measurements, and in combination with other data sources (e.g., third-party data), provides smarts that are used for personalization and automated services, as well as improving efficiency and convenience for its residents. Today's smart home platforms are primarily cloud-based, devices in the home that sense the environment and send the collected data, directly or through a hub, to the cloud. Clouds run various applications and analytics on the collected data and generate commands according to the users' specifications, that are sent to the actuators to control the environment. Focusing on cloud dependency of smart homes, this thesis makes two contributions. Design of a secure event logging system for a host-based smart home, SHEL. A secure and reliable event logging system is an essential component of smart homes with a wide range of applications such as fault detection, forensics, and accounting. We propose a host-based conceptual framework for storing and processing data in smart homes, analyze security requirements of such environments. We give an overview of our implementation of a message (event) logging system for a typical home and present the efficiency evaluation of our cryptographic design. Propose a resilient smart home. We ask the following question: What if the cloud is not available?This can happen not only by accident or natural causes but also due to targeted attacks. The role of the hub in this setup is effectively message passing between the devices and the cloud, while the required analytics, computation, and control are all performed by the cloud. We discuss possible effects of such unavailability on the functionalities that are commonly available in smart homes, including security and safety related services as well as support for health and well-being of home users. We propose the software architecture of RES-Hub, a hub that can provide the required functionalities when the cloud is unavailable. During the normal functioning of the system, RES-Hub will receive regular status updates from the cloud and will use this information to continue to provide the user-specified services when it detects the cloud is down. We describe an IoTivity-based software architecture that is used to implement RES-Hub in a flexible and expendable way and discuss our implementation.
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Keywords
IoT, Smart Home, Security and Privacy, Resilient Smart Home
Citation
Doan, T. T. (2018). Smart Home with Resilience Against Cloud Disconnection (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32955