A Security-Enabled Safety Assurance Framework for IoT-Based Smart Homes

The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has paved the way for safety-critical cyber-physical systems to enter our everyday activities. While such systems have changed the way of our life, they brought new challenges that can adversely affect our life and the environment. Safety and security are two such challenges that can hamper the widespread adoption of new IoT applications. Due to a large number of connected devices and their ability to control critical physical assets, intended attacks on them and/or unintended failure events such as mechanical failure of devices, communication failure, and unforeseen bad interactions between connected devices may cause an IoT-based system to enter into unsafe and dangerous physical states. By considering the importance of safety and security of IoT systems, in this article, we present a security-enabled safety monitoring framework for IoT-based systems. In the proposed framework, we utilize design-time system analysis to create an executable monitoring model that enables run-time safety assurance provision for a system via collecting and analyzing operational data and evidence to determine the safety status of the system and then taking appropriate actions and securely communicating the safety status and recommended actions to the system users to minimize the risk of the system entering into an unsafe state.