User Privacy Framework for Web-of-Objects based Smart Home Services

Information should be shared effectively and securely to protect users' personal identifiable information. Using a chatbot, or a computer application to share information presents a likelihood of identity theft if not properly secured. In communicating with chatbots, the user’s information is held in the chatbot application database. The availability of user information on this application may give opportunity to attackers to hijack personal user information to perpetrate crime. Unfortunately, current chatbot applications do not have a mechanism to delete or remove personal identifiable information of users. Some chatbots accept users' personal identifiable information with no recourse to the user on what happens after the chat session. To prevent a third party from trading, selling, or hacking the data, this research designed a decision system to be added to the chatbot application that will enable the user to consciously decide on how their personal identifiable information should be treated or kept. The chatbot was implemented in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), using PHP and MySQL for standard web development. Also, a PHP server was installed for the system to relate properly with the database server in fetching and storing the data. The system was tested using likelihoods that may lead to the success of the program. This was done repeatedly with different test data. The new system provides users consent on whether their personal information is left on the chatbot app or removed completely.

Internet users have been exposing an increasing amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on social media. Such exposed PII can be exploited by cybercriminals and cause severe losses to the users. Informing users of their PII exposure in social media is crucial to raise their privacy awareness and encourage them to take protective measures. To this end, advanced techniques are needed to extract users’ exposed PII in social media automatically, whereas most existing studies remain manual. While Information Extraction (IE) techniques can be used to extract the PII automatically, Deep Learning (DL)-based IE models alleviate the need for feature engineering and further improve the efficiency. However, DL-based IE models often require large-scale labeled data for training, but PII-labeled social media posts are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Also, these models rely heavily on pre-trained word embeddings, while PII in social media often varies in forms and thus has no fixed representations in pre-trained word embeddings. In this study, we propose the Deep Transfer Learning for PII Extraction (DTL-PIIE) framework to address these two limitations. DTL-PIIE transfers knowledge learned from publicly available PII data to social media in order to address the problem of rare PII-labeled data. Moreover, our framework leverages Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to incorporate syntactic patterns to guide PIIE without relying on pre-trained word embeddings. Evaluation against benchmark IE models indicates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art DL-based IE models. An ablation analysis further confirms the efficacy of each component in our model. Our proposed framework can facilitate various applications, such as PII misuse prediction and privacy risk assessment, thereby protecting the privacy of internet users.

This research analyzed 2006 Princeton survey data to investigate the relationship between Internet users' privacy concerns and types of personally identifiable information (PII) disclosed online. Drawing on Altman's primary territory theory (1975), it tested associations linking online–offline PII transferability to overall privacy concerns. For this sample, PII susceptible for spillage into offline, primary territories was most likely to engender user privacy concerns. In turn, respondents concerned about privacy self-reported limited online self-disclosures. Additional analyses uncovered age-specific effects as mediators between PII disclosure and privacy concerns. While older individuals were likely to fear negative implications of PII availability online, younger respondents highlighted uncertainty about online availability of PII as of primary concern. Theoretical relevance of online–offline transferability and the practical significance of these findings to Web site design are discussed.

The Internet of things is a new technological revolution following the computer and Internet. It aims to connect all physical objects existing in the world and forms a network with everything. In recent years, smart home gradually enters into our life. Smart home uses the Internet of things technology to connect all kinds of devices in the home, to achieve a smart home environment. Although the development of smart home has brought a qualitative leap to people’s life, there are many problems in security. Privacy security is one of the challenges to the smart home environment. Attackers can intrude various smart devices in the smart home environment, to achieve the purpose of stealing users’ personal information and privacy. Among these devices, smart cameras are the most intruded frequently. Since many cameras are installed in users’ homes to achieve real-time monitoring of the environment, but the existence of these cameras provides a channel to get information for attackers. In recent years, the leak of video privacy is emerging in an endless stream. According to the researches about privacy protection, this paper proposes a new scheme to selectively encrypt the video captured by the cameras through machine learning technology, so as to protect the personal privacy of users and improve the security of the smart home environment.

Smart homes are increasingly becoming popular because they make living comfortable, enjoyable, and secure. People can remotely control various aspects of their smart home environments. However, smart home appliances can pose threats to privacy. The reason is that smart appliances collect and store sensitive information, and if hackers gain access to this information, user privacy may be breached. It is difficult for users to constantly monitor and determine which data is sensitive to them and which one is not. Also, a user’s identity can be leaked during sharing of information with different service providers such as health care providers and utility companies. In this paper we address one important privacy issue in smart homes, which is lack of users’ control over their desired privacy. We propose a privacy decision framework which considers this problem. In this framework, active learning (machine learning) technique is used to help users detect sensitive information according to their privacy preferences.

In recent years, enterprise applications have begun to migrate from a local hosting to a cloud provider and may have established a business-to-business relationship with each other manually. Adaptation of existing applications requires substantial implementation changes in individual architectural components. On the other hand, users may store their Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in the cloud environment so that cloud services may access and use it on demand. Even if cloud services specify their privacy policies, we cannot guarantee that they follow their policies and will not (accidentally) transfer PII to another party. In this paper, we present Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) as a trusted Identity and Access Management with two requirements: Firstly, IDaaS adapts trust between cloud services on demand. We move the trust relationship and identity propagation out of the application implementation and model them as a security topology. When the business comes up with a new e-commerce scenario, IDaaS uses the security topology to adapt a platform-specific security infrastructure for the given business scenario at runtime. Secondly, we protect the confidentiality of PII in federated security domains. We propose our Purpose-based Encryption to protect the disclosure of PII from intermediary entities in a business transaction and from untrusted hosts. Our solution is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation and involves the least user interaction to prevent identity theft via the human link. The implementation can be easily adapted to existing Identity Management systems, and the performance is fast.

Internet of Thing (IoT) is going to make such a world where physical things (smart home appliances, and smart watches etc.) revolutionized the information networks and services providing systems which provide innovative and smart services to human. With smart home technology, our living area is becoming more comfortable and convenient. Smart home technology provides automated, intelligent, smart, innovative and ubiquitous services to residential users through Information Communication Technology (ICT). Due to internet-connected, dynamic and heterogeneous nature of smart home environment creates new security, authentication and privacy challenges. In this paper, we investigate security attacks in smart home and evaluate their impact on the overall system security. We identified security requirements and solutions in the smart home environment. Based on several scenarios, we suggest to set security goals for the smart home environment. Based on historical data, we forecast security attacks (like malware, virus etc.) and estimated that how many attacks are expected to be launched in coming years.

The protection of personally identifiable information (PII) is being increasingly demanded by customers and governments via data protection regulations. Private and public organizations store and exchange through the Internet a large amount of data that include the personal information of users, employees, and customers. While discovering PII from a large unstructured text corpus is still challenging, a lot of research work has focused on identifying methods and tools for the detection of PII in real-time scenarios and the ability to discover data exfiltration attacks. In those research attempts, natural language processing (NLP)-based schemas are widely adopted. Our work combines NLP with deep learning to identify PII in unstructured texts. NLP is used to extract semantic information and the syntactic structure of the text. This information is then processed by a pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm. We achieved high performance in detecting PII, reaching an accuracy of 99.558%. This represents an improvement of 7.47 percentage points over the current state-of-the-art model that we analyzed. However, the experimental results show that there is still room for improvement to obtain better accuracy in detecting PII, including working on a new, balanced, and higher-quality training dataset for pre-trained models. Our study contributions encourage researchers to enhance NLP-based PII detection models and practitioners to transform those models into privacy detection tools to be deployed in security operation centers.

Smart Home research started in 2000. Since then, Smart Home has attracted the attention of many researchers, and several studies have been conducted. This study aims to chart Smart Home research trends using bibliometric analyses from all years up to the publication date indexed in Scopus. We use keywords related to Smart Home in the Scopus database. Analysis techniques that use parameters include the year of publication, Scopus quartile range, year of publication, type of publication, journal publication, the publication of the most frequently cited maps, and density display mapping. The results show that the Q1 journal dominated since the first Smart Home publication in 2000 and peaked in 2013. The journal article type is the most commonly published compared to research conferences and other publications. Journal publications show the majority of IEEE transactions in consumer electronics. Three Smart Home publications have been cited more than 1563 times. This study also found that the words ‘smart home’, ‘technology,’ and ‘management’ are widely used by researchers. For future research, you should use keywords like ‘smart home energy management,’ ‘smart home environment,’ ‘sensor,’ ‘electric vehicle,’ and ‘smart home technology.’

Smart homes are an emerging paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) in which users can remotely control various home devices via the internet anytime and anywhere. However, smart home environments are vulnerable to security attacks because an attacker can inject, insert, intercept, delete, and modify transmitted messages over an insecure channel. Thus, secure and lightweight authentication protocols are essential to ensure useful services in smart home environments. In 2021, Kaur and Kumar presented a two-factor based user authentication protocol for smart homes using elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). Unfortunately, we demonstrate that their scheme cannot resist security attacks such as impersonation and session key disclosure attacks, and also ensure secure user authentication. Moreover, their scheme is not suitable in smart home environments because it utilizes public-key cryptosystems such as ECC. Hence, we design a secure and lightweight three-factor based privacy-preserving authentication scheme for IoT-enabled smart home environments to overcome the security problems of Kaur and Kumar’s protocol. We prove the security of the proposed scheme by using informal and formal security analyses such as the ROR model and AVISPA simulation. In addition, we compare the performance and security features between the proposed scheme and related schemes. The proposed scheme better provides security and efficiency compared with the previous schemes and is more suitable than previous schemes for IoT-enabled smart home environments.

Since the end of 2000, smartphones have explosively spread and have made people’s lives plentiful. With the start of smartphones, new smart devices, including tablet PCs, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, and smart air conditioners, have emerged, expanding their areas from individuals to business and home. These days, smart home service has drawn a lot of attention as a human-centric service. It is the environment where home appliances and other smart devices are connected to internet in order for user service and experience. The current smart home service is simply based on wireless home network to execute the function of connected home. The service has no smart home security so that it is possible for users to suffer a financial loss caused by information leakage or home appliance hacking. Therefore, to apply smart home service to surroundings, it is necessary to take into account security of smart devices. In this paper, we propose an enhanced security framework for smart devices in a smart home environment. The security framework provides the integrity system using the self-signing and access control techniques for preventing the security threats such as data modification, leakage and code fabrication.

This chapter presents the concept of Smart Home, describes the Smart Home networking technologies and discusses the main issues for ensuring security in a Smart Home environment. Nowadays, the integration of current communication and information technologies within the dwelling has led to the emergence of Smart Homes. These technologies facilitate the building of Smart Home environments in which devices and systems can communicate with each other and can be controlled automatically in order to interact with the household members and improve the quality of their life. However, the nature of Smart Home environment, the fact that it is always connected to the outside world via Internet and the open security back doors derived from the household members raise many security concerns. Finally, by reviewing the existing literature regarding Smart Homes and security issues that exist in Smart Home environments, the authors envisage to provide a base to broaden the research in Smart Home security.

Typical Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home environments are composed of smart devices that are controlled and orchestrated by applications developed and run in the cloud. Correctness is important for these applications, since they control the home’s physical security (i.e. door locks) and systems (i.e. HVAC). Unfortunately, many smart home applications and systems exhibit poor security characteristics and insufficient system support. Instead they force application developers to reason about a combination of complicated scenarios—asynchronous events and distributed devices. This paper demonstrates that existing cloud-based smart home platforms provide insufficient support for applications to correctly deal with concurrency and data consistency issues. These weaknesses expose platform vulnerabilities that affect system correctness and security (e.g. a smart lock erroneously unlocked). To address this, we present OKAPI, an application-level API that provides strict atomicity and event ordering. We evaluate our work using the Samsung SmartThings smart home devices, hub, and cloud infrastructure. In addition to identifying shortfalls of cloud-based smart home platforms, we propose design guidelines to make application developers oblivious of smart home platforms’ consistency and concurrency intricacies.

With the realisation of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, the analysis of the Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), in a smart home environment, is becoming an active research domain. The existence of representative datasets is a key requirement to advance the research in smart home design. Such datasets are an integral part of the visualisation of new smart home concepts as well as the validation and evaluation of emerging machine learning models. Machine learning techniques that can learn ADLs from sensor readings are used to classify, predict and detect anomalous patterns. Such techniques require data that represent relevant smart home scenarios, for training, testing and validation. However, the development of such machine learning techniques is limited by the lack of real smart home datasets, due to the excessive cost of building real smart homes. This paper provides two datasets for classification and anomaly detection. The datasets are generated using OpenSHS, (Open Smart Home Simulator), which is a simulation software for dataset generation. OpenSHS records the daily activities of a participant within a virtual environment. Seven participants simulated their ADLs for different contexts, e.g., weekdays, weekends, mornings and evenings. Eighty-four files in total were generated, representing approximately 63 days worth of activities. Forty-two files of classification of ADLs were simulated in the classification dataset and the other forty-two files are for anomaly detection problems in which anomalous patterns were simulated and injected into the anomaly detection dataset.

<span>The public and governmental focus have been shifted increasingly onto data and privacy due to Facebook’s standoff with Apple and several Nations’ Governments. An imperative for the discussion of data handling has been made, while Biofeedback human interfacing device (HID) companies such as CTRL-labs and Neuralink introduce new risks in the access, use, and control of personal health information. This paper combines the lexicon of digital self-extension with line drawing analysis to help visualize the industry use of personally identifiable information (PII). Through this analysis encapsulation methods of users' PII have been identified such that discussion of encrypting personal health information (PHI) can be facilitated through analogy. To reduce the likelihood that companies generating biometric hardware are subject to future legal action through laws analogous to European Privacy Law, it is in their best interest to be transparent with their users about data sharing, and educate them on how the companies encrypt their PHI. Should users consent to the use of biometric hardware, this process validates the user control of their own PHI.</span>