Home Gateway Research Articles

Lightweight Privacy Preserving Scheme for IoT based Smart Home

Background: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of physical devices, controllers, sensors and actuators that monitor and share data to another end. In a smart home network, users can remotely access and control home appliances/devices via wireless channels. Due to the increasing demand for smart IoT devices, secure communication also becomes the biggest challenge. Hence, a lightweight authentication scheme is required to secure these devices and maintain user privacy. The protocol proposed is secure against different kinds of attacks and as well as is efficient. Methods: The proposed protocol offers mutual authentication using shared session key establishment. The shared session key is established between the smart device and the home gateway, ensuring that the communication between the smart devices, home gateway, and the user is secure and no third party can access the information shared. Results: Informal and formal analysis of the proposed scheme is done using the AVISPA tool. Finally, the results of the proposed scheme also compare with existing security schemes in terms of computation and communication performance cost. The results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient and robust against different types of attacks than the existing protocols. Conclusion: In the upcoming years, there will be a dedicated network system built inside the home so that the user can have access to the home from anywhere. The proposed scheme offers secure communication between the user, the smart home, and different smart devices. The proposed protocol makes sure that security and privacy are maintained since the smart devices lack computation power which makes them vulnerable to different attacks.

IoT based security and privacy implementation in smart home

IoT based security and privacy implementation in smart home

Network traffic classification based on federated semi-supervised learning

Traffic Classification (TC) has been applied to a wide range of applications, from security monitoring to quality of service (QoS) provisioning in network Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In recent years, many researchers have applied Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL) to TC, namely AI-TC. However, AI-TC methods face significant challenges, including high data dependency, exhaustively costly traffic labeling, and network subscribers’ privacy. This paper proposes a TC framework for smart home networks using Federated Learning (FL) that protects traffic data privacy by performing local training and inference of TC models. Firstly, we design a DPI-based traffic labeling method on edge home gateways as FL nodes, which enables these nodes to have data labeling capability while protecting data privacy. Then, a semi-supervised TC model based on an autoencoder (AE) is proposed to reduce the dependence of the model on labeled traffic samples. Finally, an XAI-based method is utilized to interpret the model to ensure its explainability. We validate the proposed method on public and real datasets using benchmarking methods. The experimental results show that the method can achieve high performance using a small number of samples while protecting data privacy and improving the model’s credibility. Experimental code can be found in the following url: https://github.com/PrinceXuan12138/HGW-TC-Experimental-code.

The simulation design of smart home system based on Internet of Things

With the upgrading of the traditional home industry, the deep integration of home design and Internet of Things technology is the development direction of modern smart home design, and it creates a comfortable, energy-saving and safe working and living environment for people. This paper designs an application scenario of the Internet of Things in smart home design, integrates smart home, Internet, Internet of Things and other technologies, designs the overall architecture, topology and IP address allocation scheme of the system, and realizes the intelligent door control and temperature control system of smart home based on the simulation platform. The whole network is connected to ISP Internet through home gateway and mobile data. After testing, the system runs stably as a whole, thus providing a solution for the application of the Internet of Things in smart home.

An Internet of Things-Based Home Telehealth System for Smart Healthcare by Monitoring Sleep and Water Usage: A Preliminary Study

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted wide attention from many fields, especially healthcare, because of its large capacities for information perception and collection. In this paper, we present an IoT-based home telehealth system for providing smart healthcare management for individuals, especially older people. Each client node of the system is mainly composed of an electronic water meter that records the user’s daily water usage, in order to analyze their living patterns and lifestyle as well as ascertain their well-being, and an unobtrusive sleep sensor that monitors the user’s physiological parameters during sleep, such as heart rate (HR), respiratory rate (RR), body movement (BM), and their states on the bed or outside the bed. The collected data can be transmitted to a remote centralized cloud service by a wireless home gateway for analyzing the living pattern and rhythm of users. Furthermore, the periodic feedback of results can be provided to users themselves, as well as their family and health advisers. In the present study, data was collected from a total of 18 older subjects for one year to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system. By analyzing living patterns and rhythm, preliminary results indicate the effectiveness of the telehealth system and suggest the potential of the system regarding improvement in the quality of life (QoL) of older people and promotion of their health.

A Novel Traffic Obfuscation Technology for Smart Home

With the widespread popularity of smart home devices and the emergence of smart home integration platforms such as Google, Amazon, and Xiaomi, the smart home industry is in a stage of vigorous development. While smart homes provide users with convenient and intelligent living, the problem of smart home devices leaking user privacy has become increasingly prominent. Smart home devices give users the ability to remotely control home devices, but they also reflect user home activities in traffic data, which brings the risk of privacy leaks. Potential attackers can use traffic classification technology to analyze traffic characteristics during traffic transmission (e.g., at the traffic exit of a smart home gateway) and infer users’ private information, such as their home activities, causing serious consequences of privacy leaks. To address the above problems, this paper focuses on research on privacy protection technology based on traffic obfuscation. By using traffic obfuscation technology to obscure the true traffic of smart home devices, it can prevent malicious traffic listeners from analyzing user privacy information based on traffic characteristics. We propose an enhanced smart home traffic obfuscation method called SHTObfuscator (Smart Home Traffic Obfuscator) based on the virtual user technology concept and a virtual user behavior construction method based on logical integrity. By injecting traffic fingerprints of different device activities into the real traffic environment of smart homes as obfuscating traffic, attackers cannot distinguish between the real device working status and user behavior privacy in the current home, effectively reducing the effect of traffic classification attack models. The protection level can be manually or automatically adjusted, achieving a balance between privacy protection and bandwidth overhead. The experimental results show that under the highest obfuscation level, the obfuscation method proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the classification effect of the attack model from 95% to 25%.

Non-Fungible Tokens Based on ERC-4519 for the Rental of Smart Homes.

The rental of houses is a common economic activity. However, there are many inconveniences that arise when renting a property. The lack of trust between the landlord and the tenant due to fraud or squatters makes it necessary to involve third parties to minimize risk. A blockchain (such as Ethereum) provides an ideal solution to act as a low-cost intermediary. This paper proposes the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on ERC-4519 for smart home tokenization. The ERC-4519 is an Ethereum standard for describing NFTs tied to physical assets, allowing smart homes (assets) to be linked to NFTs so that the smart homes can interact with the blockchain and perform transactions, know their landlord (owner) and assigned tenant (user), whether they are authenticated or not, and know their operating mode (NFT state). The payments associated with the rental process are made using the NFT, eliminating the need for additional fungible tokens and simplifying the process. The entire rental process is described and illustrated with a proof of concept using a Pycom Wipy 3.0 as a smart home gateway and a smart contract programmed in Solidity, which is deployed on the Goerli Testnet for Ethereum. Experimental results show that the smart home gateway takes a few tens of milliseconds to complete a transaction, and the transaction costs of the relevant functions of the smart contract are quite affordable.

Doomed to Repeat with IPv6? Characterization of NAT-centric Security in SOHO Routers

With the transition to IPv6, addressing constraints that necessitated a common security architecture under network address translation (NAT) are no longer present. Instead, manufacturers are now able to choose between an open model design, where devices are end-to-end reachable, or a more familiar closed model, where the home gateway may continue to serve as a perimeter security device. The potential for further nuance, such as differences in default access control policies, filtering behaviors, and IPv6 specific requirements, present an environment defined by ambiguity. For the consumer, the potential impact of these changes are unclear. To address this uncertainty, we taxonomize the present NAT-centric model of consumer gateway security through a survey of over 300 common vulnerabilities and exposures surrounding NAT and hole punching protocols. From this survey, we contextualize the limited security NAT has provided while serving as the primary perimeter defense mechanism in home networks. We further define how this baseline security model for consumer gateways is reflected in IPv6 through an assessment of ten commonly deployed consumer gateways. Our conclusion is that familiarity of a NAT-centric design is no longer assured for IPv6, requiring an active involvement by users to limit exposures within their home networks.

High-Throughput CBC Mode Crypto Circuit

The objective of this study is to investigate a high-throughput cipher-block chaining (CBC) mode crypto circuit, which can be embedded in commercial home gateways or switches/routers. Concurrently, the area efficiency of block ciphers can be improved as well. However, the CBC mode encounters the problem of data dependency. To solve this issue, a data scheduling mechanism of network packets is proposed to eliminate the data dependency of input data for CBC mode pipelined crypto engines. The proposed CBC mode architecture can be applied to advanced encryption standards (AES), triple data encryption standards (3DES), and other block ciphers. In addition, to increase the throughput, deeply pipelined AES-CBC and 3DES-CBC circuits with balanced paths are proposed. With the proposed scheduling and pipelined circuits, the authors can effectively encrypt the packet data of multiple network channels at the same time. Using the proposed architecture, throughputs of 137.8 and 44.75 Gbps using a copy of pipelined AES-CBC and 3DES-CBC circuits can be achieved in TSMC 45 nm and TSMC 130 nm processes, respectively.

An IoT-Based Solution for Monitoring and Controlling Battery Energy Storage Systems at Residential and Commercial Levels

Today, increasing numbers of batteries are installed in residential and commercial buildings; by coordinating their operation, it is possible to favor both the exploitation of renewable sources and the safe operation of electricity grids. However, how can this multitude of battery storage systems be coordinated? Using the Application Programming Interfaces of the storage systems’ manufacturers is a feasible solution, but it has a huge limitation: communication to and from storage systems must necessarily pass through the manufacturers’ cloud infrastructure. Therefore, this article presents an IoT-based solution which allows monitoring/controlling battery storage systems, independently from the manufacturers’ cloud infrastructure. More specifically, a home gateway locally controls the battery storage using local APIs via Wi-Fi on the condition that the manufacturer enables them. If not, an auxiliary device allows the home gateway to establish a wired communication with the battery storage via the SunSpec protocol. Validations tests demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed IoT solution in monitoring and controlling ABB, Sonnen and SolarEdge storage systems.

Mutual authentication scheme for smart devices in IoT-enabled smart home systems

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has yielded a firm technical basis for the construction of a smart home. A smart home system offers occupants the convenience of remote control and automation of household systems. However, there are also potential security risks associated with smart home technologies. The security of users in a smart home environment is related to their life and possessions. A significant amount of research has been devoted to studying the security risks associated with IoT-enabled smart home systems. The increasing intelligence of devices has led to a trend of independent authentication between devices in smart homes. Therefore, mutual authentication for smart devices is essential in smart home systems. In this paper, a mutual authentication scheme is proposed for smart devices in IoT-enabled smart home systems. Signature updates are provided for each device. In addition, with the assistance of a home gateway, the proposed scheme can enable devices to verify the identity of each other. According to the analysis, the proposed scheme is secure against a forged SD or a semi-trusted HG. The computational cost of the proposed scheme in the simulation is acceptable for the application in smart home systems.

Biometric authentication sensor with an encryption module for prevention of h/w hacking in digital custody services

Abstract In this paper, a digital personal safe system was proposed with Fast ID Online (FIDO) transaction authentication and multiple decentralized ID (DID) personal authentications based on a home gateway. This individual custody model of personal multiple authentications will be linked to the transaction authentication of digital assets stored in the storage space of the home gateway by the DID of smart devices and the FIDO server for a public platform that excludes digital asset (cryptocurrency [e.g., Bitcoin] or NFT asset) management based on individual private keys and user interaction (user interface and user experience [UI/UX]) at home. To strengthen the security of the proposed digital custody model, it was proposed to apply a local device to which a biometric sensor equipped with an encryption module that can fundamentally block the hacking of biometric information is applied. It is implemented with Verilog for an embedded fingerprint sensor block and decryption program implemented with C.

An optimization-based machine learning technique for smart home security using 5G

Generally, cellular networks are divided into discrete geographic zones where a secure routing protocol is important. In this study, Sailfish-based Distributed IP Mobility Management (SbDMM) architecture for security protocol in a smart home using 5G is suggested. Smart homes first gathered data via IoT devices which are then communicated with the use of a Home Gateway (HGW). Mobile Nodes (MN) and Corresponding Nodes (CN) process data communication (CN). In addition, the acquired data are encrypted and secured using the session key. Additionally, use an authenticated key and a cipher key to secure the routing optimization. As a result, the fitness of sailfish is updated in a protocol path that is optimized for securing data from attackers. The designed framework is then implemented in Python and the obtained results are compared to those of other methodologies in terms of execution time, confidentiality rate, efficiency, delay, and task completion.

An Evaluation of Ubiquitous Service Discovery and Remote Management in Ad-Hoc Networks

Due to the rise of ubiquitous computing, issues around the discovery of new services have become a hot topic in the academic community. This is because futuristic ubiquitous computing frameworks as well as unsupervised Ad hoc systems will require service discovery. Automatically discovering network services and their characteristics, as well as dynamically advertising their persistence, are both possible with service discovery. Multiple service discovery technologies, including Service Discovery Protocols (SDP) runners, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), Service Location Protocol (SLP), and Jini, have been suggested. In this paper, we detail the process of service discovery and control using Ubiquitous Remote Manager (URM), a system for remote and autonomous management of home gateways that allows for more system simplicity and finer grained command of the underlying network in a ubiquitous computing setting. Ubiquitous Service Discovery (USD) is a key component of the infrastructure of the smart homes of the future. USD's goal is to locate the most suitable service, given the user's preferences and needs, in a pervasive and extensive setting.

A blockchain-based dynamic and traceable data integrity verification scheme for smart homes

A smart home system composed of numerous smart devices has benefited people’s life due to the feature of convenience. With the development of smart home technology, huge amounts of data stored on external servers flow between different smart devices, and the integrity of these data is of great importance to the security of smart home systems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based data integrity verification scheme that supports efficient dynamic operations for a smart home system. In the verification scheme, we utilize the home gateway (HG) to aggregate all the data information and design a data structure that can be efficiently and dynamically operated to store the tag information of the data, which can reduce the local storage pressure in smart home systems. Moreover, homomorphic verifiable tags are used to formulate verification strategies and record the interactions between HG, cloud service providers (CSP), and third-party auditor (TPA) on the blockchain to make the verification service traceable and useful. Then, the theoretical analysis and experiments prove that the scheme is effective and cost-acceptable in smart home systems.

Smart Home Control and Management Based on Big Data Analysis.

In order to improve the effect of smart home control and management, a new smart home control and management method based on big data analysis is designed. The basic hardware of smart home control and management is designed, including smoke sensor hardware, temperature and humidity sensor hardware, and infrared sensor hardware, so as to collect smart home data and realize data visualization and buzzer alarm. The collected data are transmitted through the indoor wireless network of smart home gateway equipment, and the data distributed cache architecture based on big data analysis is used to store smart home data. Based on the relevant data, the hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to schedule the control and management tasks of smart home to complete the control and management of smart home. The experimental results show that the device control and scenario management effect of this method is better, and the communication performance is superior and has high practical application value.

Definition of an FHIR-based multiprotocol IoT home gateway to support the dynamic plug of new devices within instrumented environments

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become a milestone advancement in the digital healthcare domain, since the number of IoT medical devices is grown exponentially, and it is now anticipated that by 2020, there will be over 161 million of them connected worldwide. Therefore, in an era of continuous growth, IoT healthcare faces various challenges, such as the collection over multiple protocols (e.g. Bluetooth, MQTT, CoAP, ZigBEE, etc.) the interpretation, as well as the harmonization of the data format that derive from the existing huge amounts of heterogeneous IoT medical devices. In this respect, this study aims at proposing an advanced Home Gateway architecture that offers a unique data collection module, supporting direct data acquisition over multiple protocols (i.e.BLE, MQTT) and indirect data retrieval from cloud health services (i.e. GoogleFit). Moreover, the solution propose a mechanism to automatically convert the original data format, carried over BLE, in HL7 FHIR by exploiting device capabilities semantic annotation implemented by means of FHIR resource as well. The adoption of such annotation enables the dynamic plug of new sensors within the instrumented environment without the need to stop and adapt the gateway. This simplifies the dynamic devices landscape customization requested by the several telemedicine applications contexts (e.g. CVD, Diabetes) and demonstrate, for the first time, a concrete example of using the FHIR standard not only (as usual) for health resources representation and storage but also as instrument to enable seamless integration of IoT devices. The proposed solution also relies on mobile phone technology which is widely adopted aiming at reducing any obstacle for a larger adoption.

An Intelligent Wireless Charger Based on the Internet of Things

With the development of the times and the progress of science and technology, people continue to explore new possibilities; the leap from wired to wireless is one of them, breaking the limitations. Similar to wireless mice and wireless microphones, this paper aims to study an Internet of Things-based smart wireless charger that, by using mathematical analysis and wireless charging technology, requires experiments to include wireless charging stations, associated chip areas, and home gateways that are used in combination with them. In the experiment, the control circuit, transmit circuit, and reception circuit of wireless charger are studied, and the wireless charging system is analyzed and calculated in detail, and a wireless charger is designed. Electromagnetic field sensing, radio wave transmission, and resonance methods are applied to achieve the shortest charging time and the best quality in order to prevent the charger from heating and burning during charging. Experimental data show that this Internet of Things-based smart wireless charger can fully replace wired chargers for 99% of small appliances; the charging efficiency of large electrical appliances such as desktop computer is also 1.4 to 1.6 times increased. Experimental data show that this Internet of Things-based smart wireless charger can efficiently and conveniently charge electrical appliances; however it is relatively expensive; the required technology is relatively complex but can make charging more efficient. It can be seen that wireless charging has a major breakthrough in the concept of future charging.

Smart Home Gateway Based on Integration of Deep Reinforcement Learning and Blockchain Framework

The development of information and communication technology in terms of sensor technologies cause the Internet of Things (IoT) step toward smart homes for prevalent sensing and management of resources. The gateway connections contain various IoT devices in smart homes representing the security based on the centralized structure. To address the security purposes in this system, the blockchain framework is considered a smart home gateway to overcome the possible attacks and apply Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The proposed blockchain-based smart home approach carefully evaluated the reliability and security in terms of accessibility, privacy, and integrity. To overcome traditional centralized architecture, blockchain is employed in the data store and exchange blocks. The data integrity inside and outside of the smart home cause the ability of network members to authenticate. The presented network implemented in the Ethereum blockchain, and the measurements are in terms of security, response time, and accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed solution contains a better outperform than recent existing works. DRL is a learning-based algorithm which has the most effective aspects of the proposed approach to improve the performance of system based on the right values and combining with blockchain in terms of security of smart home based on the smart devices to overcome sharing and hacking the privacy. We have compared our proposed system with the other state-of-the-art and test this system in two types of datasets as NSL-KDD and KDD-CUP-99. DRL with an accuracy of 96.9% performs higher and has a stronger output compared with Artificial Neural Networks with an accuracy of 80.05% in the second stage, which contains 16% differences in terms of improving the accuracy of smart homes.

A Secure Internet of Things Smart Home Network: Design and Configuration

Many home IoT devices are joining IoT networks by gaining access to some home gateway that configures smart, multimedia, and home networks. To enable secure IoT-based home networking services, (1) an IoT network should be effectively designed and configured with a IoT server, (2) a messaging protocol is required to exchange information between the IoT server and IoT devices, and (3) the home gateway should monitor all safety aspects in both inbound and outbound traffic of the home network. However, not all home network users put in consideration the need for an adequate security posture. Instead, many users still rely on the minimum home network security by setting an easiest-to-guess password to restrict unauthorized access to their home gateway. In this paper, we propose a network design and configuration that enables secure IoT services with MQTT messaging protocol for home networks. With the proposed network design, a home network is interconnected to external networks through a home gateway. To separate the IoT-subnet from other parts of home network, the home gateway subdivides a home network into an inside-subnet and an IoT-subnet with a private IP address using subnet masking. The IoT server, located in the IoT-subnet can be implemented with either a general HTTP server or a security server that acts as an MQTT broker. The secure communications among network entities are governed by a home gateway operating a well-configured extended access control. The effectiveness of the proposed design and configuration is verified through a simulation by showing that it does not impose any significant performance degradation for reinforced security. We expect the proposed configuration to help facilitate interconnection among heterogeneous network entities.