Brussels, 20/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) has published a report on the security of smart homes. The publication, Threat Landscape and Good Practice Guide for Smart Home and Converged Media, seeks to identify both the cybersecurity risks and challenges as well as the countermeasures required for emerging technologies in smart homes. It provides an overview of the current state of cyber security in this emerging domain.
“The smart home is a point of intense contact between networked information technology and physical space, and therefore brings together security risks from both the virtual and the physical contexts. Identifying cyber threats is crucial for the protection of the smart home and is therefore a key element in ensuring its successful deployment”, said ENISA Executive Director Udo Helmbrecht.
Within the scope of the study, threat agents have been identified revealing several sources of vulnerability. Cyber criminals are identified as the largest and most hostile threat category, while the potential abuse of smart homes should be considered high with the increasing number of smart devices and homes and particularly converged media. Furthermore, several economic factors generate security vulnerabilities, while design choices are competing against cost and convenience. Many of the risks will be of a socio-technical type due to the depth and variety of personal information that can be captured and processed, and will produce data on previously unrecorded activities, with a close link between people and their environments. Converged media and television raise security issues in terms of connectivity, embedded functionality, opaque systems and incompatibility with traditional information security approaches, along with issues of privacy, access and copyright. (Isabelle Lamberty)