Cybersecurity by design for smart home environments

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being increasingly adopted by businesses to improve operations, processes, and products. While it opens endless opportunities, it also presents tremendous challenges especially in the area of cyber risks and related security controls. With billions of interconnected devices worldwide, how do we ensure that they are sufficiently secure and resilient? As a reasonable solution, ‘Cybersecurity by Design’ seems a promising approach. In this research, ‘Smart Homes’ - as IoT containing products – are selected as unit of analysis because they are exposed to numerous cyber threats with corresponding adverse consequences for the life, safety and health of residents. By aiming to secure Smart Home Environments (SHEs) from cyber threats, we adopted ‘design science’ as methodology and developed a holistic approach, highlighting ‘good practices’, which can be applied in every phase of the SHEs product lifecycle. In addition to these good practices, a ‘Cyber Security Maturity Assessment’ tool for SHEs has been developed. Both artefacts have already been validated and incrementally improved, and are now awaiting their future application and further enhancements.