Securing Over-the-Air Code Updates in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the growing number of wireless devices in the internet of things (IoT), maintenance and management of these devices has become a key issue. In particular, the ability to wirelessly update devices is a must in order to fix security issues and software bugs, or to extend firmware functionality. Code update mechanisms in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a subset of IoT networks, must handle limited resources and strict constraints. Also, over-the-air (OTA) code updates in the context of an IoT ecosystem may open new security vulnerabilities. An IoT security framework should therefore be extended with additional mechanisms to secure the OTA code update functionality. The chapter presents an overview of various OTA code update techniques for WSNs and their security flaws along with some existing attacks and possible countermeasures. It is discussed which attacks can be used more easily with the code update functionality. Countermeasures are compared as to whether they secure the weakened security objectives, giving a guideline to choose the right combination of countermeasures.

Security Awareness in the Internet of Everything

Our societal infrastructure is transforming into a connected cyber-physical system of systems, providing numerous opportunities and new capabilities, yet also posing new and reinforced risks that require explicit consideration. This chapter addresses risks specifically related to cyber-security. One contributing factor, often neglected, is the level of security education of the users. Another factor, often overlooked, concerns security-awareness of the engineers developing cyber-physical systems. Authors present results of interviews with developers and surveys showing that increase in security-awareness and understanding of security risks, evaluated as low, are the first steps to mitigate the risks. Authors also conducted practical evaluation investigating system connectivity and vulnerabilities in complex multi-step attack scenarios. This chapter advocates that security awareness of users and developers is the foundation to deployment of interconnected system of systems, and provides recommendations for steps forward highlighting the roles of people, organizations and authorities.

IoE-Based Control and Monitoring of Electrical Grids

In many countries, renewable energy production already represents an important percentage of the total energy that is generated in electrical grids. In order to reach higher levels of integration, demand side management measures are yet required. In fact, different from the legacy electrical grids, where at any given instant the generation levels are adjusted to meet the demand, when using renewable energy sources, the demand must be adapted in accordance with the generation levels, since these cannot be controlled. In order to alleviate users from the burden of individual control of each appliance, energy management systems (EMSs) have to be developed to both monitor the generation and consumption patterns and to control electrical appliances. In this context, the main contribution of this chapter is to present the implementation of such an IoT-based monitoring and control system for microgrids, capable of supporting the development of an EMS.

Water Management for Rural Environments and IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are starting to be developed for applications in the management of water quality monitoring systems. The chapter presents some of the work done in this area and also shows some systems being developed by the authors for the Alentejo region. A general architecture for water quality monitoring systems is discussed. The important issue of computer security is mentioned and connected to recent publications related to the blockchain technology. Web services, data transmission technology, micro web frameworks, and cloud IoT services are also discussed.

Internet of Everything (IoE)

The internet of everything (IoE) envelopes the internet of things (IoT) that was simply focusing primarily on machine-to-machine sensor-based smart device communications. The IoE expands to include people and processes in a much more comprehensive scope. The internet of everything is expanding our ability to collect massive amounts of data for comprehensive analysis to achieve a level of understanding not previously possible. Since the internet of everything (IoE) has such a strong focus on collecting and analyzing data using smart sensor-enabled devices, eye tracking data is a perfect match. Eye tracking and other biometric sensor-based data can be collected and analyzed locally in real time through fog/edge computing or cloud-based big data analytics.

Challenges and Trends in Home Automation

Home automation (HA) systems can be considered as an implementation of the internet of everything (IoE) where many devices are linked by intelligent connections in order to improve the quality of life at home. This chapter is dedicated to analyzing current trends and challenges in HA. Energy management, safer homes, and improved control over the house are some of the benefits of HA. However, privacy, security, social disruption, installation/maintenance issues, economic costs, market fragmentation, and low interoperability represent real problems of these IoE solutions. In this regard, the latest proposals in HA try to answer some of these needs with low-cost DIY solutions, wireless solutions, and IP-based HA systems. This chapter proposes a way to deal with the interoperability problem by means of the open-source platform openHAB. It is based on the concept of a home automation bus, an idea that enables the separation of the physical and the functional view of any device, allowing to create a technology-agnostic environment, which is perfect for addressing the interoperability problem.

Ambient Assisted Living and Internet of Things

The study of systems and architectures for ambient assisted living (AAL) is undoubtedly a topic of great relevance given the ageing of the world population. On the one hand, AAL technologies are designed to meet the needs of the ageing population in order to maintain their independence as long as possible. On the other hand, internet of things (IoT) proposes that various “things,” which include not only communication devices but also every other physical object on the planet, are going to be connected and will be controlled across the internet. The continuous technological advancements turn possible to build smart objects with great capabilities for sensing and connecting turn possible several advancements in AAL and IoT systems architectures. Advances in networking, sensors, and embedded devices have made it possible to monitor and provide assistance to people in their homes. This chapter reviews the state of art on AAL and IoT and their applications for enhanced indoor living environments and occupational health.

Mixing Different Realities in a Single Shared Space

The concept of internet of everything involves an intelligent connection of people, processes, data, and things. In this sense, shared spaces aimed to connect different users that collaborate following a common purpose are of relevance to the field. Many computer-based collaborative environments have been proposed in recent years. However, the design of mixed-platform collaborative spaces, in which different paradigms—such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)—are blended, is still uncommon. This chapter aims to analyze the benefits and features of these systems, reviewing existing related works and proposing a series of features for the design of effective mixed-platform collaborative shared spaces. In particular, the authors propose five setups with different levels of immersion/interaction, which are aligned to the current state of the art. These systems will be analyzed with respect to navigation, user representation, interaction, and annotation, among others. Finally, some applications are proposed within the given framework.

Cloud-Based IoT Platform

Developing IoT projects from scratch requires a lot of knowledge and expertise; moreover, it takes a very long time to be developed. It can be hard for starters and even senior developers to perfect every aspect of an IoT project in a timely manner. These aspects include hardware, communication, data storage, security, integration, application, data processing, and analysis. This chapter introduces a cloud-based platform that is concerned with data storage, device management, data processing, and integration with external systems, all while providing high level of security and allowing for future scaling. This platform should accelerate and simplify the development of IoT projects by lowering the entry barrier and offloading some of the burden off developers to give them more time to focus on other aspects such as hardware and applications. The authors discuss many implementation issues in the functional and design perspective that may guide others to make their own platforms from this insight view.

Internet of Everything

In this chapter, the authors put forward the notion of internet of everything (IoE) as an effort to maximally connect our communication infrastructure to the universe, which can itself be regarded as the real IoE, an interconnected network of physical phenomena (i.e., Everything we perceive as independent wholes that persist through time, such as molecules, light, waves, living organisms, and celestial objects, with the purpose of gaining better understanding of its mechanisms and manipulating them to enable novel technologies via a networked sensing, analysis, and actuation approach). The strategy to outline the IoE effort is by dissecting the vast IoE landscape into IoXs according to their various application domains (Xs), for each of which the authors give an up-to-date account of the state-of-the-art in related fields and point out the challenges in contemporary research faces. They also discuss a wide spectrum of challenges and future research directions (e.g., ubiquitous connectivity, security, big data, etc., which are common to many IoXs and penetrate into the IoE effort in general).