Internet of Things and smart homes: cyber security and personal data protection in a fragile environment
Master Thesis
Author
Καραμπογιάς, Αθανάσιος
Karampogias, Athanasios
Date
2021View/ Open
Keywords
Smart homes ; Internet of Things ; Cyber security ; Privacy ; Personal dataAbstract
From the beginning of the “4th industrial revolution” and the rapid evolution of technology over the past decades, modern ICT's play a critical role in everyday life of governments, organizations and billions of individuals all over the world. The enhancement of the large capabilities the technological growth has brought in almost all sectors (governance, financial, communication, transportation, accommodation etc.) comes along with its risks, as most aspects of personal life that depend on
technology. How “invasive” modern services can be to an individual's private life is a matter of deep consideration, along with how the protection of one's private/sensitive information could be secured; both from a technological and a regulatory/law
perspective. These issues and, in general, security and privacy nowadays, are a major concern in developing/maintaining and expanding current and future ICTs, along with the policies applied to the collection and management of personal data by
organizations, enterprises, public administration, supervising bodies and authorities. The scope of this essay is to examine matters of security and privacy in the field of Internet of Things and especially in Smart Homes. The massive collection of personal data and their excessive misuse, creates a number of emerging needs that need to be dealt by the community; not only with secure and applicable engineering solutions that protect privacy in these environments, but also with implementing, on a large scale, policies that ensure that any individuals' personal information subject to processing would be treated properly. Dealing with these issues is urgent, considering the innovative nature in these fields is closely related with the collection of personal
data; in fact, a lot of the services/applications that these fields are offering are based on the massive collection of such information. In this essay we will try to outline those issues and discuss possible solutions.