SIFIS-Home: Secure-by-design and consistent software framework to enhance resilience of Interconnected Smart Home Systems
30 June 2020
Intelligentsia Consultants are very pleased to have supported a consortium of leading academic and industrial partners to win the 4.8m euro Horizon 2020 funded SIFIS-Home project.
SIFIS-Home aims at providing a secure-by-design and consistent software framework for improving resilience of Interconnected Smart Home Systems at all stack levels. To this end, the framework enables the development of security, privacy aware and accountable applications, algorithms and services, and makes it possible to detect and dynamically react to cyberattacks and intrusion attempts or violation of user-defined policies, thus increasing control and trust of Smart Home end users.
Smart Home is an emerging application paradigm which has been gaining popularity in the last few years. Most recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been fostering a vision of Smart Home systems, where users can install connectable (smart) devices and appliances that cooperate to automatically manage home services and functionalities. This emerging market is rapidly attracting software developers to produce novel applications and services, to provide additional Smart Home functionalities. However, noticeable barriers and concerns are still present, mainly related to cyber-security and safety within Smart Home systems, as well as to the privacy and integrity of produced and consumed data, most of which are personal and sensitive.
As of today, most of the state-of-the-art Smart Home devices typically use custom and proprietary security solutions, which do not take into account interactions with other devices in the Smart Home system. Moreover, developers have to strive in developing applications adaptable to different systems and architectures, where security aspects are often neglected or not properly addressed. This results in security vulnerabilities, lack of privacy-oriented management of data, and issues in setting up multi-vendor systems.
SIFIS-Home addresses these concerns by providing a full-stack, flexible software framework targeting application developers, Smart Home administrators and end-users. Needs to address these aspects for IoT environments and their interaction with the human users have also been identified by the four pilot projects of the European Cyber Competence Network, whose common vision is aligned with the principles followed by SIFIS-Home.
The SIFIS-Home mission is to improve the resilience of interconnected Smart Home systems, by providing a full-stack, interoperable software framework for management of security and safety in Smart Home system. SIFIS-Home provides both: development APIs compatible with a major commercial IoT architecture for development of certifiable, secure and privacy-aware applications; and a resilient, fault tolerant, secure-by-design software framework to handle privacy-aware data management, privacy-preserving data analysis, secure communication, system security, key management, security and safety policy management, anomaly and intrusion detection and prevention.
The project consortium combines leading industry players in the IoT, telecommunication and cyber-security markets with research and academic institutions, also involved as leader contributors in premier international standardization bodies such as IETF, and having leading roles in the SPARTA, CONCORDIA and CyberSec4Europe projects of the European Cyber Competence Network. SMEs well versed in the Smart Home and IoT market and with relevant roles in the Open Source community complete the consortium.
The three year project is expected to start in October 2020.
