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1. Authorization Framework for Secure Cloud Assisted Connected Cars and Vehicular Internet of Things

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3205977.3205994  

   Gupta, Maanak; Sandhu, Ravi (June 2018, Proceedings of 23rd ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT’18))

   Internet of Things has become a predominant phenomenon in every sphere of smart life. Connected Cars and Vehicular Internet of Things, which involves communication and data exchange between vehicles, traffic infrastructure or other entities are pivotal to realize the vision of smart city and intelligent transportation. Vehicular Cloud offers a promising architecture wherein storage and processing capabilities of smart objects are utilized to provide on-the-fly fog platform. Researchers have demonstrated vulnerabilities in this emerging vehicular IoT ecosystem, where data has been stolen from critical sensors and smart vehicles controlled remotely. Security and privacy is important in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) where access to electronic control units, applications and data in connected cars should only be authorized to legitimate users, sensors or vehicles. In this paper, we propose an authorization framework to secure this dynamic system where interactions among entities is not pre-defined. We provide an extended access control oriented (E-ACO) architecture relevant to IoV and discuss the need of vehicular clouds in this time and location sensitive environment. We outline approaches to different access control models which can be enforced at various layers of E-ACO architecture and in the authorization framework. Finally, we discuss use cases to illustrate access control requirements in our vision of cloud assisted connected cars and vehicular IoT, and discuss possible research directions. 

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2. The SemIoTic Ecosystem: A Semantic Bridge between IoT Devices and Smart Spaces

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3527241  

   Yus, Roberto; Bouloukakis, Georgios; Mehrotra, Sharad; Venkatasubramanian, Nalini (August 2022, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology)

   Smart space administration and application development is challenging in part due to the semantic gap that exists between the high-level requirements of users and the low-level capabilities of IoT devices. The stakeholders in a smart space are required to deal with communicating with specific IoT devices, capturing data, processing it, and abstracting it out to generate useful inferences. Additionally, this makes reusability of smart space applications difficult, since they are developed for specific sensor deployments. In this article, we present a holistic approach to IoT smart spaces, the SemIoTic ecosystem, to facilitate application development, space management, and service provision to its inhabitants. The ecosystem is based on a centralized repository, where developers can advertise their space-agnostic applications, and a SemIoTic system deployed in each smart space that interacts with those applications to provide them with the required information. SemIoTic applications are developed using a metamodel that defines high-level concepts abstracted from the smart space about the space itself and the people within it. Application requirements can be expressed then in terms of user-friendly high-level concepts, which are automatically translated by SemIoTic into sensor/actuator commands adapted to the underlying device deployment in each space. We present a reference implementation of the ecosystem that has been deployed at the University of California, Irvine and is abstracting data from hundreds of sensors in the space and providing applications to campus members. 

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3. iMOST: An IoT Framework for Energy Efficient Street Lights

   Uddin, Md Milon; Stapp, Joshua; Vechione, Matthew; Sundaravadivel, Prabha (October 2022, 2022 IEEE 8th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT))

   The amount of greenhouse gas emissions from streetlights is equivalent to 2.6 million cars with as many as 26 million streetlights in the United States. The proposed IoT controller integrates sensors to make these streetlights as hubs for smart environment monitoring with effective energy usage. Conservation of energy is one of the main concerns in the modern era, and energy coming from the sun can be utilized efficiently alongside a smart streetlight management system instead of conventional streetlight management techniques. Additionally, with streetlights being present throughout a city, the opportunity to collect city-wide weather data is proposed. To this end, a solar-powered IoT-based smart street lighting and environmental monitoring system is proposed. The proposed energy-efficient IoT-based system uses a microcontroller to control light-emitting diode (LED) streetlights depending on lighting conditions and vehicle detection, ensuring that the streetlights can be turned on when needed. 

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4. Safeguarding User-Centric Privacy in Smart Homes

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3701726  

   Yu, Keyang; Li, Qi; Chen, Dong; Hu, Liting (November 2024, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology)

   Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been increasingly deployed in smart homes to automatically monitor and control their environments. Unfortunately, extensive recent research has shown that on-path external adversaries can infer and further fingerprint people’s sensitive private information by analyzing IoT network traffic traces. In addition, most recent approaches that aim to defend against these malicious IoT traffic analytics cannot adequately protect user privacy with reasonable traffic overhead. In particular, these approaches often did not consider practical traffic reshaping limitations, user daily routine permitting, and user privacy protection preference in their design. To address these issues, we design a new low-cost, open source user-centric defense system—PrivacyGuard—that enables people to regain the privacy leakage control of their IoT devices while still permitting sophisticated IoT data analytics that is necessary for smart home automation. In essence, our approach employs intelligent deep convolutional generative adversarial network assisted IoT device traffic signature learning, long short-term memory based artificial traffic signature injection, and partial traffic reshaping to obfuscate private information that can be observed in IoT device traffic traces. We evaluate PrivacyGuard using IoT network traffic traces of 31 IoT devices from five smart homes and buildings. We find that PrivacyGuard can effectively prevent a wide range of state-of-the-art adversarial machine learning and deep learning based user in-home activity inference and fingerprinting attacks and help users achieve the balance between their IoT data utility and privacy preserving. 

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5. A Data-Driven Approach to Developing IoT Privacy-Setting Interfaces

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3172944.3172982  

   Bahirat, Paritosh; He, Yangyang; Menon, Abhilash; Knijnenburg, Bart (January 2018, 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces)

   User testing is often used to inform the development of user interfaces (UIs). But what if an interface needs to be developed for a system that does not yet exist? In that case, existing datasets can provide valuable input for UI development. We apply a data-driven approach to the development of a privacy-setting interface for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Applying machine learning techniques to an existing dataset of users' sharing preferences in IoT scenarios, we develop a set of "smart" default profiles. Our resulting interface asks users to choose among these profiles, which capture their preferences with an accuracy of 82%---a 14% improvement over a naive default setting and a 12% improvement over a single smart default setting for all users. 

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