Security, Privacy and Reliability of Smart Buildings
J.UCS Special Issue
Steffen Wendzel
(Department of Cyber Security, Fraunhofer FKIE, Germany /
Department of Computer Science, Worms University of Applied Sciences, Germany
steffen.wendzel@fkie.fraunhofer.de)
Jörg Keller
(Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Hagen, Germany
joerg.keller@fernuni-hagen.de)
Smart buildings are automated buildings that deliver essential
services to the modern society. These buildings reduce the energy
consumption of homes, increase the safety of inhabitants, increase the
comfort for employees and reduce operating cost by automatically
operating elevators, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning, and
perform essential services within large infrastructure buildings,
e.g. smart video surveillance on airport terminals. Today's smart
buildings are equipped with a steadily increasing number of features
while providing rather limited security features. Hurdles to increase
the security of smart buildings are rooted in several reasons. For
instance, new buildings are usually required to be compatible to older
components integrated decades ago, which do not provide any security
features. The patchability of controller software is another unsolved
problem, and the integration of state-of-the-art security features
into these old operating environments is difficult due to limited
computing power and memory of legacy systems.
The special issue targeted all types of automated buildings, being it
commercial, public, or residential buildings, their network
infrastructure and all operating environments. Research papers were
allowed to address organizational aspects of smart building security,
hardware-level security, network-level security and usability.
The call for papers for this special issue was distributed over
relevant mailing lists, call-for-paper distribution websites, personal
and university websites, and on the homepage of the journal. In
a ddition to submissions of new articles, extended versions of accepted
papers from the Workshop on Security, Privacy and Reliability of Smart
Buildings have been invited for submission under the condition of
providing at least 50% new content. The submissions were peer-reviewed
by experts in the domain. Based on the reviews and our own judgment,
three articles were selected for publication in this special issue.
In the first contribution, entitled "Machine learning methods for
anomaly detection in BACnet networks", Jernej Tonejc, Sabrina Güttes,
Alexandra Kobekova and Jaspreet Kaur introduce a framework which
allows the detection of anomalies and attacks in BACnet network
traffic using unsupervised machine learning algorithms, BACnet being
one of the more prominent building automation network stacks.
In the second paper, entitled "A comprehensive dependability approach
for building automation networks", Lukas Krammer, Wolfgang Kastner and
Thilo Sauter provide a generic concept for reliability, safety and
security in the area of building automation systems. To this end, they
introduce a so-called Generic Dependability Layer that is integrated
into the communication architecture of smart buildings.
In contribution number three, entitled "Secure control applications in
smart homes and buildings", Friedrich Praus, Wolfgang Kastner and
Peter Palensky present an architecture for distributed control
applications in both, smart buildings and smart homes. Their solution
addresses the security problem of software that is running on
different device classes.
We would like to express our thanks to Christian Gütl (Managing
Editor) and Dana Kaiser (Head of Editorial Team) for permitting us to
organize this special issue under the umbrella of the Journal of
Universal Computer Science. We also like to thank all reviewers who
facilitated the review process, namely François-Xavier Aguessy, Luca
Caviglione, Bernhard Fechner, Amir Houmansadr, Wolfgang Kastner,
Jean-François Lalande, Masood Masoodian, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Delphine
Reinhardt, Thomas Rist, Peter Schartner, Jernej Tonejc, Tao Yue and
Sebastian Zander. Last but not least, we like to thank all authors for
submitting their work to this special issue.
Steffen Wendzel
Jörg Keller
(Guest Editors)
|