Internet of Things Garage

Cyber Academic Startp Accelerator Programme

Cyber Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (Resilient Built Environments)

Smart Built Environments is composed of physical and digital infrastructure and aims to improve data-driven decision-making and provide faster and cheaper operation and maintenance (e.g., better whole-life value). There are a heterogeneous set of systems deployed in these buildings, which reflect the complex and heterogeneous nature of the IoT marketplace. These heterogeneities and ad-hoc nature of the deployments (e.g., IoT systems are not always built into the buildings. Instead, they are deployed retrospectively at different times since commissioning a building) make these buildings more vulnerable to malicious activities (e.g., cyber-physical attacks). A smart home study carried out by NCC Group and the Global Cyber Alliance recorded more than 12,000 attack attempts in a week, including 2,435 specific attempts to maliciously log into the devices. Once they gain control, they can manipulate the device’s capabilities including network communication, actuation, and sensing. To address the above challenges, our project aims to develop and commercialize a resilient cyberphysical anomaly detection framework to detect cyber-physical malicious activities within built environments (i.e., smart homes and buildings). We aim to achieve this by combing heterogeneous sets of data streams such as external sensor data observations and energy consumption data with traditional Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) techniques.




Team


Funding

Innovate UK

Innovate UK is the United Kingdom's innovation agency, which provides money and support to organisations to make new products and services. It is a non-departmental public body operating at arm's length from the Government as part of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation organisation.


Partners

PETRAS 2

PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity is a consortium of eleven leading UK universities which will work together over the next three years to explore critical issues in privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, acceptability, and security.

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)

Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence and information assurance to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom.

Building Research Establishment (BRE)

The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is a centre of building science in the United Kingdom, owned by a charitable organisation, the BRE Trust. BRE provides research, advice, training, testing, certification and standards for public and private sector organisations in the UK and abroad.


Outcomes

Technical Report
Charith Perera, Hakan Kayan, Yasar Majib, Resilient Built Environments (CASPER Shield Project Report), The Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP) Report, 2023