SaTC: Frontiers: Collaborative: Security and Privacy in the Lifecycle of IoT for Consumer Environments (SPLICE)

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) now involves the deployment of Smart Things in everyday residential environments -- houses, apartments, hotels, senior-living facilities -- resulting in Smart Homes. This era of Smart Things, in which everyday objects become imbued with computational capabilities and the ability to communicate with each other and with services across the Internet, creates novel security and privacy risks. Project SPLICE -- Security and Privacy in the Lifecycle of IoT for Consumer Environments -- addresses these risks by examining the human, social, and technological scope of the security and privacy challenges emerging in Smart Homes across a wide range of residential stakeholders, including owners, occupants, renters, visitors, and domestic workers. SPLICE will also contribute to the design of manageable systems for trustworthy Smart Homes by recommending a set of Best Practice Principles for the entire ecosystem of residential IoT products and systems. SPLICE research addresses issues important to these stakeholders, including: (1) situational awareness for Smart-Home residents through new approaches that discover, identify, and locate both cooperative and non-cooperative devices, and discover information flows from such devices; (2) novel interfaces and discovery techniques that enable a new approach to privacy management, one that shifts the burden from end-users to consumer-proxy organizations that have the capability to evaluate the privacy posture of Smart Things; (3) a holistic conceptual framework for reasoning about privacy, based on SPLICE study of stakeholders' perceptions and expectations of privacy in Smart Homes. By exploring these issues across various types of multi-stakeholder residential settings, SPLICE will deepen scientific understanding of the human factors of privacy and security across different environments and develop innovative technologies to support security and privacy throughout the lifecycle of Smart Things. The project includes programs for middle-school students, research and experiential-learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, professional development for postdoctoral scholars and junior faculty, and community outreach. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.