Cyber Security of the Internet of Things
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Southampton
Department Name: Sch of Electronics and Computer Sci
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Publications
Madaan A
(2018)
Observing Data in IoT Worlds: What and How to Observe?
Paul Smart
(2017)
The Social Scaffolding of Machine Intelligence
in International Journal on Advances in Intelligent Systems
Schueler M
(2019)
From Observatory to Laboratory: A Pathway to Data Evolution
Siow E
(2018)
Analytics for the Internet of Things A Survey
in ACM Computing Surveys
Smart P
(2018)
Where the smart things are: social machines and the Internet of Things
in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
Tinati R
(2017)
The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Emerging Internet-Of-Things
Wang X
(2017)
Sharing Databases on the Web with Porter Proxy
Yang M
(2018)
Differentially Private Data Sharing in a Cloud Federation with Blockchain
in IEEE Cloud Computing
Yang Mu
(2018)
Differentially Private Data Sharing in a Cloud Federation with Blockchain
in IEEE CLOUD COMPUTING
| Description | The IoT Observatory is being developed as a core platform and set of technologies to support observation, analysis, and visualization of different IoT applications/devices within integrated IoT ecosystems such as smart cities, critical infrastructure support. Drawing on emerging standards for metadata such as HyperCat, big data technologies (such as storm), IoT data stream protocol formats such as MQTT, CoAP are some of the core features of the observatory platform. At the core of the IoT Observatory ecosystem is a platform that orchestrates device discovery, data integration across sensor streams, data aggregation, statistical analyses and sharing among different stakeholders. A critical feature provided by the IoT Observatory fine-grained access control to ensure data authentication and authorization policies to address the concerns of sensitive information. For this, we are in process of enriching the metadata associated with datasets, streams, data statistics, visualizations and applications to enable user consent for sharing the sensitive sensor data to certain degree. An authentication service for legitimate sharing and re-use of resources on the observatory is being developed to address the concerns of localized authorization decision making in IoT applications. |
| Exploitation Route | Informed the specification development for PEDASI IoT Observatory project under PETRAS Programme. |
| Sectors | Agriculture, Food and Drink,Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Energy,Environment,Financial Services, and Management Consultancy,Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Retail,Transport |
| Description | The IoT Observatory is envisaged as a core platform for both the academic and user-partners at the PETRAS hub for IoT data-sharing and re-use across different themes of research. The capabilities of the observatory to support sharing of both historical and real-time sensor data streams complaint with the HyperCat metadata vocabulary can direct impact the standardization, and building IoT data-ecosystems critical for IoT research. We expect to run user-engagement workshops, analyzing user's privacy and trust concerns and understanding their interactions with other stakeholders for a variety of data processing and analytic applications. This is critical for real-world implementation of the platform for sharing and re-using IoT resources. We expect a widespread impact in terms of providing an infrastructural support for secure and legitimate sharing of IoT resources across different research themes and application areas within the PETRAS community and the IoT community at large. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2016 |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Economic,Policy & public services |
| Title | IoT Observatory |
| Description | The development of the IoT Observatory is key towards a core platform and a set of associated technologies in order to support the observation, analysis, and visualisation of interactions and activities in IoT ecosystems. Integration with existing IoT Metadata standards such as the HyperCat make the observatory a robust tool for inter-domain research analyses. Inspired by the Web Observatory platform the IoT Observatory provides infrastructure support for sharing of IoT datasets and analytical applications contributed by various academic and user-partners of the PETRAS for critical research and implementation analyses. The IoT Observatory platform orchestrates several components for data ingestion, integration, storage, and streaming to support data re-use and sharing critical for IoT application domains such as smart cities. To address the privacy concerns of the stakeholders in any IoT ecosystems the observatory platform provides legal and ethical frameworks along with technological support for authentication and authorization. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | The IoT Observatory infrastructure is expected to provide critical support for the PETRAS academic and user-partners for sharing research outputs, datasets, and statistics for larger challenges such as tools for detecting data authenticity, verification, and engagement with the IoT user communities in a variety of application domains including Smart cities and healthcare among others. |
| URL | https://iotobservatory.io/ |
| Description | HEALTH-I CityVerve |
| Organisation | CISCO Systems |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | We are working on design of health based use case to illustrate the common concerns of Manchester and Southampton City and how it can be addressed within the scope of the HEALTH-I project |
| Collaborator Contribution | A set of 35use cases have been shared that are key to the Manchester city |
| Impact | - The Asthma use case from the list of use-cases has been identified that can feed the HEALTH-I project with a good use case. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Hybrid Engagement Architecture Layer for Trusted Human-centric IoT |
| Organisation | Southampton City Council |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | We are engaging with the Southampton City Council as user partner to collaborate on the behavioural and data sharing components of our proposed research work on modeling human factors in IoT and for cybersecurity over distributed stores. It will especially focus on developing distributed personal data stores and crowdsourcing methods and human computation methods to enable the local citizens to actively participate in the smart city IoT ecosystem to improve trust, privacy, security, and data sharing within critical IoT infrastructure. |
| Collaborator Contribution | At the initial stage, the Southampton city council is expected to facilitate the research by providing research datasets on citizen behavior and data sharing activities within different agencies in a smart city. It would also provide the user test beds for testing the human computation models developed as part of research work by the project |
| Impact | -With the initial support of the Southampton City council as user-partners, funding has been requested through the PETRAS internal strategic funds call. With the support from the PETRAS hub we expect to do a comparative study on user behavior and adoption of smart devices and technologies across different cities in the UK |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Microsoft Azure and IoT Observatory |
| Organisation | Microsoft Research |
| Country | Global |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | The IoT Observatory spans across the PETRAS themes of privacy, security, policy, trust, adoptability and acceptability. It aims to provide artefacts and tools for sharing IoT datasets on a large distributed scale to support innovation within and beyond the PETRAS academic and user-partners. The IoT Observatory project aims to identify and address infrastructural, technological and legal issues to that end, and will initiate the deployment of an infrastructure that will enable individuals or organisations to share IoT datasets. This activity work in synergy with existing initiatives within the Web Science and Internet Science communities. The project will build on the learnings from the Web Observatory project (supported by Microsoft Azure) and improvise on the challenges of real-time requirements of data analytics along with ensuring privacy and security of end-users, organizations and other stakeholders. The project will also initiate a number of activities for community engagement for the development of analytics and visualisations on those datasets across the PETRAS community. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Through the engagement with Microsoft Azure team and using the 12 month trial period of Azure and IoT suite, the IoT observatory will explore mutual collaborations over analytics and sharing of IoT datasets (and streams) within the PETRAS community and install multiple instances of the IoT observatory within the hub describing a global network of IoT observatories for IoT research. This will have a number of domain specific applications including, healthcare, smart cities, risk analysis in critical infrastructures. IoT Observatory project will build on learnings of Web Observatory infrastructure which aimed at sharing Web data (also backed by MS Azure). |
| Impact | The IoT Observatory team will identify a number of research (ethical, legal and technical) challenges in large scale data sharing and share these with the Azure team and the Azure team would engage continuously through use of IoT suite functionalities with the observatory team.This would lead to establishing various test nodes of Azure backed IoT Observatory nodes within and beyond PETRAS. |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Description | SOLIT: Solidifying IoT |
| Organisation | Ordnance Survey |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | Integrating inputs and research datasets obtained from the Ordnance Survey, the project will support the user-partners with agency/application specific datastores. These datastores will be made available through a data-sharing and mapping framework capable of mapping and integrating the sensor and spatio-temporal in a secure way while addressing the privacy concerns. Secure services will be delivered for data mapping and sharing that will be directly implementable in real-world settings of Ordnance Survey and its partners. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Partnering with Ordnance Survey we expect to obtain rich topographic datasets for a variety of contexts such as critical infrastructure design, urban planning, insurance risk and environment management. This is dataset will be critical to our project implementation and testing phase for making services ready for real-world settings. |
| Impact | With the support and engagement of through initial discussions with the Ordnance Survey a research proposal for first internal strategic funds call with the PETRAS hub has been submitted. Obtaining the same we wish to support engagement activities between PETRAS hub partners and the Ordnance survey at large. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Understanding Emergence of Cyber Physical Social Machines |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The concept of "social machines" is increasingly being used to characterize and describe various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines imitate real-life processes and activities including human communication, opinion formation, interactions, and knowledge creation. Social machines continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The relationship between humans and machines has become further complicated by the scale of adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. Scale, automation, continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices has added a third dimension to the relationship between humans and machines. As a result, new concerns of privacy and security are emerging. The divergent nature of these new socio-technical systems which we call Cyber Physical Social Machines (CPSMs) makes the problem non-trivial both at a systemic and conceptual level. In this study, we attempt to describe different exemplars of Cyber Physical Social Machines enabled and created by IoT devices. We describe the as-sociated challenges of security and privacy threats and emphasize the need for further studies in the proposed area of Cyber Physical Social Machines. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Exchange of research ideas and joint discussions |
| Impact | A joint research paper on Cyberphysical social machines has been submitted the 10th ACM WebSci Conference 2018. |
| Start Year | 2018 |
| Title | IoT Observatory |
| Description | A datasets and analytic apps metadata catalogue that is built on top of multiple standards and widely adopted technologies such as Schema.org, DCAT, OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | Hosting multiple IoT related datasets/streams. |
| URL | http://iotobservatory.io/ |
| Title | Porter Proxy for securly exposing database interfaces on the Web |
| Description | With a large number of datasets now available through the Web, data-sharing ecosystems such as the IoT Observatory have emerged. The IoT Observatory provides an active decentralised ecosystem for datasets and applications based on a number IoT Observatory sites, each of which can run in a different administrative domain. On a IoT Observatory, users can publish and securely access datasets across domains via a harmonised API and reverse proxies for access control. However, that API provides an interface that is different from the underlying databases', and consequently, existing applications built on top of those database interfaces require major modification to work with the Web Observatory ecosystem. We propose a lightweight architecture called Porter Proxy to address these issues. Porter Proxy exposes the same interfaces as databases as requested by the users while enforcing access control. |
| Type Of Technology | New/Improved Technique/Technology |
| Year Produced | 2017 |
| Impact | Enable applications to communicate with datasets shared in the IoT Observatory. |
| Description | Data Sharing in IoT Worlds: Concerns for Privacy and Security |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | A research talk was given about data sharing in IoT worlds and how an observatory approach can support it. The talk explained the information linkage as a privacy threat and how observatory can handle this at a prototype level my estimating the probability of data linkage. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Data Sharing in IoT Worlds: Concerns for Privacy and Security |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The talk was given as part of UK Web and Data Science Mission to Taiwan from 11-13 December. It was attended by 50-100 students, faculty members from various universities in Taiwan at Academia Sinica. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | From Observatory to Laboratory: A Pathway to Data Evolution |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Presentation delivered as part of the 2019 Living in the Internet of Things conference, organized by the UK Institution of Engineering and Technology. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
| URL | https://tv.theiet.org/?videoid=12998 |
| Description | IoT Observatory Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | On July 24, 2017, IoT Observatory based at University of Southampton and the CRACS project based at Oxford e-Research Centre hosted a day long workshop at the Oxford e- Research Centre. The workshop was part of the series of workshops planned as part of the IoT Observatory project for dissemination of learnings on open research challenges for data sharing and reuse and integrating the outcomes of other PETRAS projects to build a data ecosystem for PETRAS infrastructure. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together and understand perspectives of PETRAS user-partners, policy, standards and governance stream, privacy and trust stream on technical, ethical and policy challenges for data sharing and re-use in the IoT ecosystems. The workshop participants represented both academic and user-partners including UCL, University of Oxford, University of Southampton, Telefonica (O2) and DigitalCatapult. The workshop was chaired by Prof. David de Roure, OERC and Alisdair Ritchie. University of Warwick represented the PETRAS hub in the workshop. The agenda began with an overview of scoping IoT Observatory in the world of IoT data sharing and re-use. The IoT Observatory platform is capable to foster an ecosystem for data upcycling, facilitating interactions between stakeholders and engage communities. A detailed "show and tell" of the existing features of the IoT Observatory by the team. The IoT observatory team also shared their experiences of philosophical and technical challenges faced during development and design of the architecture. Some of these include: • Enabling sharing of heterogeneous databases through the observatory. • Reverse proxy implementation to support end-users' metadata on the IoT observatory without having to give out their actual datasets in contrast to existing catalogues such as, CKAN. • Facilitate real-time of IoT data sharing. • Querying and analysing time-series IoT data and enabling personal IoT observatory implementation on light weight computers. • Access control model for accessing data on the IoT Observatory based on usage and purpose. The second session focused on discussing the open research challenges that can support technical capabilities of the IoT observatory. And the final session discussed ethical and policy frameworks that can be integrated with the IoT Observatory infrastructure and methods to assess trustworthiness of users decision making on the IoT Observatory.Key Messages "Why IoT Observatory matters" • It is a piece of infrastructure that can bring together the research outputs of projects within the PETRAS to describe the philosophical, technical, ethical and legal challenges for IoT data innovation. • In addition to data and analytics sharing and re-use, a significant contribution of observatory can be to foster innovation by enabling sharing of methods and tools different projects use for analytics and applications on datasets, including software and user-studies. • Test the standardization of terminologies and vocabulary using the datasets available on the observatory. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.petrashub.org/iot-observatory-workshop-on-technical-and-ethical-challenges-of-secure-dat... |
| Description | IoT Observatory: Data Sharing and It's Challenges |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | A talk on the IoT Observatory project was given as part of the event based on the The Impact of Internet of Things on our Lives highlighting four important areas: developments and IoT technologies, applications, connected society and finally data and security. The event took on the 24th of March 2017 at IBM. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://nmi.org.uk/event/impactech-event-the-impact-of-internet-of-things-on-our-lives/ |