HANOVER — Beware the baby cam. It might betray you.
As internet and sensor technology become embedded in everyday devices — baby monitors, TV’s, heating and air conditioning systems, kitchen appliances, health monitoring gadgets — so too do risks to privacy as users’ personal information can fall into the wrong hands through technical glitches and loopholes.
Now a $10 million grant by the National Science Foundation to a seven-university team of researchers led by a Dartmouth College computer science professor may help you, in a manner of speaking, sleep better at night — regardless if the baby wakes up crying.
Lyme resident David Kotz, professor of computer science at Dartmouth, is spearheading a team of computer scientists, engineers, sociologists and policy scholars to research and make recommendations on how to secure the array of “smart devices” increasingly used in homes from leaking — unintentionally or through hacking — the personal information the devices collect in the course of operation.
Working under the acronym SPLICE — for Security and Privacy in the Lifecycle of IoT for Consumer Environments — Dartmouth’s share of the funding comes to about $5 million over five years, about half of which it will pay out to other institutions in the consortium, netting the college about $2.5 million, which will be used for paying undergraduate and graduate student researcher stipends, equipment, faculty time, a staff person, research and lab activities.
“The technology in the average home today is radically different from even a decade ago and is likely to change even more rapidly in the coming years,” Kotz said in a news release. “Home is a place where people need to feel safe from prying eyes. SPLICE will address the challenges required for the vision of smart homes to be realized safely and successfully.”
So-called smart devices, known in industry parlance as “internet of things” (IoT) and which enable users to do everything from seeing who is delivering packages to controlling a home’s heating or air conditioning system or activating a lawn sprinkler system through a phone app, are predicted by some to be the biggest advancement in home design since the widespread introduction of appliances in the 1950s and portable consumer electronics in 1960s.
But, unlike the UL Standard label seen on electrical products which certifies to their safety, there is no universal protocol that ensures the scores of devices expected to make their way into homes are secure from data breaches. Moreover, because smart devices are connected with the internet, the personal information that they collect in the course of operation is vulnerable.
(One notable example occurred in 2013 when hackers stole the debit card numbers of 40 million customers who shopped at Target by accessing the computer network of an HVAC contractor that was working at Target’s stores.)
Kotz in an interview Thursday said his particular interest in the project is addressing the challenge posed by ensuring that new owners of a home are aware of all the smart devices involved in the transfer of the property — think of the equivalent of an inspector’s report that identifies all the imbedded digital technology, for example — and discloses what personal information the devices collect and who has access to it.
A related challenge, he said, comes when the devices are “decommissioned — ensuring that devices I discard, recycle, or give/sell to someone else, no longer have any of my personal information, or passwords that would allow them to access my personal information online.”
The findings and recommendations that eventually emerge from the SPLICE study will be published formally in science journals and “best practices” protocols, but Kotz also expects them to be disseminated informally via industry workshops and by students “who go into science or who go work for an IoT company” and through “conversations with industry advisors” who shape standards.
The other institutions participating in the project are Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, Morgan State University and Tufts University.
Dartmouth said that “more than half of the principal investigators” in SPLICE “are from groups underrepresented in computing.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
