Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control

ended

To effectively respond to the multitude & complexity of cybersecurity challenges in smart-homes GHOST deploys a pioneering software-enabled ‘usable security’ solution. The project brings professional level security to the European citizens and to this end it: (a) increases the automation level & effectiveness of existing security services; (b) opens up the cybersecurity ‘blackbox’ to consumers, creates understanding and builds trust through effortless decision support & advanced ‘usable transparency’; (c) enhances the system’s self-defence by safeguarding critical security-related data using blockchain technology. GHOST software will be embedded in an adequately adapted smart-home network gateway though it will be designed to be vendor-independent. A dedicated middleware layer ensures interoperability with multiple gateways & IoT devices. GHOST considers the relationship between security and usability to be an integration challenge (positive sum game) and definitely not a trade-off (zero-sum game). In this context, the project envisions to lead a paradigm shift in consumer cybersecurity by successfully coupling usable security with transparency and behavioural engineering. The envisaged user experience will systematically trigger security-friendly behaviour aiming at establishing appropriate ‘habitual behaviours’. The solution will perform network analysis & deep packet inspection for suspicious pattern recognition, will apply machine learning for malicious behaviour detection, will carry out context-aware real-time risk assessment, and widely apply analytics & visualization for effortless user comprehension & decision support. In short, GHOST will (i) increase cybersecurity resilience; (ii) boost usability & automation; and (iii) enhance the competitiveness of European ICT security industry. GHOST will be demonstrated in more than 140 real smart-homes in Spain, Norway & Romania via the Red Cross network and beta testers from the customer basis of Televes & ThingsMaze.