2014 6th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC)
A Secure Scheme for a Smart House Based on Cloud
of Things (CoT)
Bashar Alohali, Madjid Merabti, Khasif Kifayat
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool, United Kingdom
B.A.Alohali@2012.ljmu.ac.uk,{M.Merabti, K.Kifayat}@ljmu.ac.uk
Abstract Many systems and technologies are involved with
smart housing including communication technology, IT systems,
actuators, sensors and advanced monitoring building blocks. The
devices powering smart homes are systems implanted in
appliances that are sensor-based and network-enabled. The
possibility of accessing appliances through the Internet is
referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). A Cloud of Things
(CoT) virtualizes the IoT and provides monitoring and
visualization. The emerging CoT services in smart housing will
enable a new generation of systems and intelligent use of a
collection of applications that can be accessed in real time.
Despite its benefits, CoT may also be subject to some security and
privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a secure scheme for a
smart house based on CoT. Our scheme defines how a connected
home device is serviced from the CoT to bring it into the secure
zone of the network operation infrastructure. Specifically, we
illustrate how the security requirements are administered from
the CoT and discuss a secure scheme for key management for
smart housing.
Keywords-Smart Home, Cloud of Things, Smart Grid, Security,
Key Management
I. INTRODUCTION
With the large proliferation of sensing devices with
wireless communication capabilities, wireless sensors are
finding use in many utility sectors, including healthcare. Their
form factor makes them integrateable into several kinds of
devices, appliances and machines for purposes of monitoring
and/or control. While wireless sensors and wireless sensor
networks have become all pervasive, it is least surprising
that they have invaded homes. Smart homes or intelligent
homes are made up of appliances and accessories those are
sensor enabled and networked so they lend themselves to
network based monitoring and control. Smart homes, in
addition to providing a good degree of functional automation,
are expected provide a higher level of living comfort to the
occupants. In a home, heating systems, kitchen appliances,
lighting systems, security systems, entertainment systems,
water and sewage systems are all instrumented with sensors
performing different functions in addition to a common
function of wireless communications. Such systems have been
evolving over the last decade and have now matured as
implementable systems in a smart home. Often, access to these
systems is via a Home Management System (HMS) which
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University of Essex, UK
could be accessible via the Internet or via a smartphone app
[1]. Such remote access is a recent development.
Two concurrent developments in the power industry, in the
last decade, are a consequence of the proliferation of wireless
sensor networks. The traditional power grid is evolving into a
smart grid, with the smartness brought in by two factors the
instrumentation of power metering (smart meters) and
distribution systems with sensors and the ability to respond to
power demand on the grid by virtue of being able to monitor
the power flow and power flow trends with data from the
sensors enabled metering, power distribution and control
infrastructure. The first smart grid implementation was in 2005
[3]. Needless to mention, the smart home, a power consumer of
the smart grid is now monitor able for its use and demand. This
is especially necessary with the arrival of electric automobiles
(cars) which have charging points at homes and drive up the
demand. The rising adoption of roof top solar panels on homes
has elevated smart homes from being mere consumers to being
prosumers (consumers and producers). The smart home,
therefore, has assumed an important role in the context of the
smart grid. Smart homes, apart from raising the comfort levels
of living to their occupants, provide a means to efficient energy
utilisation, energy saving, non-carbon electricity generation
and, in general achieve environment friendliness and go-Green.
In the functional ambience of the smart home, there are
several technology terms that apply. The Internet of Things
(IoT) is the wireless network of sensors, the sensor enabled
electricity meter, is the Smart Meter (SM) a component of the
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) of the Smart Grid,
The Home Management System (HMS) is the system that
manages the IoT, provides access to the sensors and
implements policies for their functional control, and the Home
Area Network (HAN) is the communication network
infrastructure in the smart home that is used for all the inter-
device communication.
It is in this context that we introduce the need for security
of the systems in the Smart Home. Towards this, we propose a
security scheme to ensure that the data that is transferred is
secure. The scheme addresses the limitations of the sensor
devices which are low computing power, low storage and low
availability of operational power considering some of the
wireless sensors which are not integrated on to appliances and
are deployed outdoors could be battery operated.
 2014 6th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC)
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II
has a description of the problem and presents a literature
review of security solutions for smart homes. In Section III, we
describe the architecture model for the HAN based on CoT and
the details of proposed security mechanism for smart housing.
Section IV lists the security requirements and details the
proposed scheme followed by an estimation of the energy
utilisation. Section V concludes the paper.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
In our context, there are two broad security requirements
to regulate access to the HAN and to the data on the HMS, and
the devices it interconnects and the privacy of the data that the
devices send or receive to their upstream control or
aggregation point which could be in the cloud. In addition to
this, it is necessary to ensure that the data from the devices on
the HAN of the smart home which is stored either in the HMS
or in the cloud be secure. Trappe et al. [5] provide a
comprehensive overview of the security and privacy
requirements in sensor networks and mention the various
security threats to sensor networks. They remark that sensors
are both inevitable and pervasive and therefore their use must
focus on security right from the design.
Our focus is on ensuring that the transfer and exchange of
data between the devices on the HAN and the HMS or the
Cloud, is secure. Therefore, the problem we address is the
means of securing the data transfers between the sensors that
interconnect to the upstream device using the HAN.
Specifically, we address how this group of devices interact to
begin secure communications between them, using encrypted
and authenticated data transfers between them. The central
issue in enabling secure communications is how the key/s
necessary for encryption and signing are distributed to the
group. This then becomes a problem of addressing key
management in wireless sensor networks (WSN). However,
the difference is in the communication pattern. While in
WSNs the communication between the sensors is mesh-like,
the communication in our context is not between the sensors,
but from the sensors to an upstream host. There are similar
contexts that arise in the case of Smart Grids that monitor
appliance power consumption via the smart meters [12]. We
compare a few of those schemes to illustrate the problem that
needs to be addressed.
Roman et al. [8] address the applicability of public key and
private key cryptographic systems and the associated key
management schemes. They illustrate that public key
cryptographic systems (PKCS) are computationally expensive,
especially in the decryption process and are therefore not
suitable for use with low resource devices such as sensors.
While private key cryptographic systems are better suited for
use on sensors, in terms of computation costs, they require
manual initialisation processes to ensure that the shared
private keys are coded into their memories. Another
disadvantage they point out is that the elements that they share
their keys with, especially, if it happens to be an upstream
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University of Essex, UK
node communicating with a group, will require storing all the
shared keys of all the elements in the group and therefore
becomes the weakest link in the security chain. Alternately,
the entire group, the upstream node and the individual sensor
nodes can share a single group key but then that has a security
disadvantage that if one node in the group is compromised, all
nodes get affected. They conclude mentioning that pre-shared
key approaches can be useful for server nodes (sensor nodes in
the role of servers in a WSN) in small real-world applications.
For the design of our solution, we consider the smart home as
a small real-world application.
Baig [9] asserts that for protecting critical infrastructures
using an agent based approach, an assurance of confidentiality
and integrity of all data stored and communicated between
collaborating multi-agents is necessary. Critical infrastructures
are very large systems with several levels of interaction,
compared to a smart home scenario. Nevertheless, the security
requirements are similar. Komninos et al. [10] have, in
addition to reiterating the security requirements of the HAN,
specified the kind of security attacks that can occur in a smart
home and classified their impact as Low (L), Moderate (M)
and High (H), in line with FIPS 199 [10]. They mention five
specific attacks, namely attacks on energy consumption
reporting (L-M), import/export of energy from/to the grid if
the smart home is a prosumer (M), physical tampering of the
meter (L), remote home monitoring and control (L-H) and
requests for energy data (L-M). Our context does not include
physical tampering of the meter.
In summary, the security of HANs in the smart home are
usually viewed as connected to a smart grid. The solutions
mentioned so far use a single trusted agent as a store/issuer of
keys for all cryptographic operations required for
authentication and data privacy. In the smart home context, the
addition of a separate host as Home Trusted Agent (HTA) will
be a security (additional security required to harden the HTA
since it contains the secret key), maintenance and financial
overhead and is not desired. Apart from the use of a single
trusted host/agent, these schemes assume that the individual
sensors require interaction. Interfacing the smart meter to the
HAN is not the best way of collecting monitored data from the
HAN. The smart meter is owned the power company and
interfacing it to work with the HAN may not be
administratively desirable, apart from the security concerns it
may raise, such as attacks from within the HAN. Our solution
intends to keep the smart meter out of the HAN. This leads us
to define our working architecture and detail the scope of the
solution.
III. NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
Fig. 1 details the components and their interconnectivity.
The smart home consists of appliances that are grouped into
two. One is made up of appliances which require a basic
operation, essentially a one way communication and is termed
as Group 1. The other is made up of appliances that can be
monitored and controlled thereby requiring a two way
communication and is termed as Group 2. Each group has a
group controller through which the devices in each group
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 2014 6th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC) University of Essex, UK

communicate. The group controllers, in turn, communicate 2. The smart devices in the two groups and their
with the cloud of things (CoT) service. respective group controllers use unicast
communication.
We include the HMS function in the cloud which has 3. The group controllers and are trusted devices.
access to the monitored data from the devices in the smart 4. The HMS is registered with the group controllers
home. It interfaces with the CoT service within the cloud for 5. The devices in each group are interconnected as a
tree with the devices as leaf nodes.
6. An adversary could eavesdrop on all traffic or replay
messages since the HAN uses wireless technologies
7. Time stamps are used for data freshness checking.
The time is not synchronized across the devices on
the smart house, but the time stamps are verified to
ensure they are incremental and periodic. This
requires that the devices that verify the data for
authentication and/or freshness store the time stamp
of the previously received data.
Figure 1: The Smart Home and its interconnectivity to the CoT and the
Smart Grid
Cloud
Group 1 Group 2 Controller Controller
(HMS/
Data regarding the smart home and to send control Devices Devices for Group 1 for Group 2
CoT)
commands to the devices. Smart phone access to the HMS is Group 1

via the Internet to the cloud based services (not shown in the Device
Group 2
figure). The smart meter, which is a part of the smart home, is
Device
not interconnected to the HAN. It connects to the smart grid Controller

via the AMI. The smart grid also uses a cloud infrastructure for Group 1
for its services. Any data regarding the smart home is sourced Controller

via the HMS in the CoT cloud. The group controllers for Group 2
Cloud
communicate with the cloud using a public data network such
(HMS/CoT)
as the Internet via wired broadband links. They may be
configured to use 3G/4G as fall back connectivity TABLE I. COMMUNICATION MATRIX FOR THE SMART HOME
mechanisms. Within the smart home, the devices in the groups
and their respective group controllers will communicate using IV. GROUP KEY MANAGEMENT FOR THE SMART HOME
technologies like ZigBee or use WiFi access. The objective of
our solution is to provide an effective means of secure We propose a Group key management scheme for the
communication. smart home elements. Symmetric key cryptography is
deployed for secure communication between the devices in
A. Security Requirements each group and the respective group controller as well as for
Given the functionality and interaction mentioned, the the communication between the group controller and the
functional security requirements are as follows: cloud/HMS. We do not include the communication between
1. The devices within the smart home must be the smart grid NOC and the HMS in the scope of this
physically secured to the extent possible. Physical proposal. The objectives of the proposal are to provide secure
compromise of a device is unavoidable and can lead data exchange between the communicating elements such that
to loss of functionality of a part of the smart home. the elements of each of the groups in the smart home with the
2. Access to the monitored data of the smart home must following features all data is encrypted, the encryption key
be to authorised entities only. changes with time, the encryption key distribution is secure
3. Given that most of the interconnectivity is wireless, and the resources on the sensors are optimally used.
the data sent or received should be secure enough The operation of the scheme requires that the devices
such that any one sniffing packets on the wireless participating in the scheme be configured before deployment.
channels cannot decipher the data.
4. It should be extremely difficult for an attacker to gain Pre-deployment Phase
1. Assign a unique ID to every device in Group 1 and Group 2 and
access to the smart home data or to gain control of
the two group controllers
the HMS when physically within the smart home.
2. In Group 2:
a. Assign a unique group key to group controller of Group 2.
The assumptions made for designing the solution are
This group key is shared with all devices in the group
b. Use the group key and the ID of the device to generate a
1. We do not consider device to device-to-device unique key for each device in Group 2
communication within a group or across a group.
3. In Group 1:
a. Assign a unique key to the group controller for Group 1
b. Assign the same key to every device in Group1
c. Assign the shared key provided by the HMS
4. Group Controllers 1, 2:
a. Assign the group key shared with the group
b.Assign a different group key shared by the HMS
5. HMS
a. Register the unique IDs of the Group 1, Group 2 devices and
the group controllers in the HMS
b. Share a unique group key with the group controllers

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 2014 6th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC) University of Essex, UK

This is termed as the pre-deployment phase. The activities in encrypted for privacy. The HMS generates an encryption key
the pre-deployment phase are first illustrated. Then, it is
followed by an explanation of the communication and
authentication between the nodes within a group and their
group controller and the group controllers and the smart meter.
The operational steps are illustrated in pseudo-code rather than
a numbered list, for better readability.
There are two distinct parts to the operation, namely, the
pre-deployment phase and the authentication, key
management and communication phase. The pre-deployment
phase comprises of priming the various sensors in the two
groups with operational security information such as shared
keys and distinct identities.

TABLE II. SHARED KEYS AND DATA SIZES EXCHANGED

Figure 3: HMS to Group 1 device interaction via the Group
Group Group Controller Controller
# Controller 1
1 2 for Group for Group Cloud/HMS
keys
Device Device 1 2
Group 1 Group Key 1 Group Key 3 using the shared key with GC1, SK1 and the ID of GC1.
2
Device No data 144 bits
Group 2

Group Key 2 Group Key 4
2 D and the time stamp are encrypted using the generated key
Device 208 bits 144 bits and sent to GC1
Controller Group
Shared Key 1
for Group Key 1 2
No data Upon receipt at GC1, GC1 recognises that the message has
1 208 bits
Controller Group
Shared Key 2
arrived from the HMS. It now generates the decryption key
for Group Key 2 2 using the shared key with the HMS, SK1 and its ID and
208 bits
2 208 bits
decrypts the message. If the message is successfully
Group Group Shared Key Shared Key
Cloud decrypted, it verifies the time to ensure that the value is
Key 3 Key 4 1 2 4
HMS
144 bits 144 bits 208 bits 272 bits greater than the previous value it received from the HMS. It
then reads D to identify the ID of the Group 1 device to which
In summary, the keys that each device contains are listed the message is destined to. GC1, then packages the message to
in Table 2. Notice that each of the devices and the group the device by encrypting D and its time stamp using the shared
controllers has two keys each and the HMS has the maximum key with Group 1 devices, GK1. On receiving this message,
number of keys. the Group 1 device decrypts the message using GK1 to
retrieve D, verifies the time stamp, decrypts D using the
The operation of the scheme is as follows: shared key with HMS, GK3, retrieves the time stamp,
validates it and then accepts the command sent by the HMS.
The interaction between the HMS and the devices in the
groups are shown in Figs. 2 and 3. In Group 1, the In Group 2, (ref. Fig. 3) the communication is from the HMS
communication is between the HMS and the device which are to the Group 2 devices via the GC2. The data packaging is
typically ON/OFF commands. The HMS first forms the data D similar to that for Group 1 devices except for the addition of a
(ref. Fig 2) to be sent to the device in group 1. Recall that the random number generated by the HMS. GC2 records the
data to the device in group 1 is sent via the group controller 1 random number and the random number is used with SK2 to
(GC1). The HMS generates a triplet of the ID of the group 1 generate a key for sending data to the HMS. When the Group
device, and the command text for the device and a time stamp. 2 device needs to send data to the HMS, the same two step
The command and the time stamp are privately sent to the process is followed. Using the random number ensures that the
device in group 1 via GC1. Therefore, the command and time key is changed every time the HMS receives some data.
stamp are encrypted using the symmetric key shared between
the HMS and the device in Group 1, Group Key 3 (GK3). This The advantages of this solution are symmetric key
message is now packaged to be destined to GC1 which is the encryption is used throughout and therefore the compute load
next immediate recipient. A triplet of D, a time stamp and the for privacy is low and so are the bit overheads, the key
ID of GC1 is formed. D and the time stamp need to be distribution is mostly static except for the key exchange
between the HMS and the GC2 where a random number is
exchanged and the solution is simple, effective and easily
manageable. The limitations are the configurations are to be
statically done, fast scalability is a problem because including
a device in Group 1 or Group 2 will require updating
information in the respective controllers and the HMS, and

Figure 2: HMS to Group 2 device and Group 2 device to HMS

interaction via the Group Controller 2
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 2014 6th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC)
any physical takeover of a device by a malicious attacker can
provide sufficient information to disrupt communications in
the smart home.
A. Security Analysis
We briefly illustrate how our proposed security scheme meets
some specific security requirements:
1) Backward and Forward Secrecy: requires that a
device should not have access to the group before
joining the group and it should not have access to the
group after leaving the group. Having to register the
ID of the device with the HMS and the group
controller ensures that a device requires to be
registered to participate in a group. Therefore the
backward and forward secrecy requirements are met.
2) Resilience against replication attacks: An attacker
could replay old messages that have been obtained
from previous communication. However, in our
scheme time stamps are sent along with the data and
each of the receiving entities verify them against the
previously received time stamps which are stored on
the devices. The time stamp is used as a session token
which is expected by the receiver with a reasonable
tolerance in value when checked against the
periodicity of data expected.
3) Resistance to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks:
Messages exchanged between HMS and the devices
in the two groups are crucial in a smart home. The
data generated by the devices are encrypted using the
key shared with the HMS. It is forwarded to the HMS
via the group controllers without being decrypted at
the group controllers. An attacker will therefore not
have access to the data on the network in a direct
form, except at the two end points. In addition to the
encryption, the group controller authenticates the
node either by verifying the time stamp and ID
(Group 1) or by being able to decrypt the contents
using a key from the shared key using the ID of the
node as well as verify the time stamp (Group 2), both
of which are encrypted. So, an attacker will be
required to guess two keys to be able to access the
data sent by an end device. Thus the confidentiality
of the data is achieved
B. Energy Consumption Estimation
Several authors have continually measured the amount of
energy taken for transmission and reception of bits, in
literature. References [15], [16] and [17] are early examples
with the first generation of sensors. Further, De Meulenaer et
al. [13] have made measurements for the amount of energy
expended per bit in terms of transmitting and receiving and
Damasevicius et al. [14] have estimated the energy required
for computing hashes as well as for encryption. We use these
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University of Essex, UK
results and with some approximations, make estimates of the
energy consumption. These sensors, unlike in the case of field
deployed wireless sensors, are mounted within appliances and
should be powered via the appliances power. However, they
might need to be independently accessible for purposes of
control when the devices are turned off. Hence we assume that
the sensors are powered by batteries (NiMH, 1200 mAh ~=
5184 Joules). We then attempt to estimate two things the
amount of energy expended by devices in the Group 1 and
Group 2 for a certain regime of monitoring and use and the
energy utilisation for the group controllers for these two
groups.
Energy is consumed for transmission, reception and
encryption related activities, with the maximum energy being
utilised by transmission and reception. Both these are
quantified by the energy consumed per bit. 0.72 micro
Joules/bit and 0.81 micro Joules/bit are utilised for
transmission and reception, respectively [13]. The energy
requirement for AES encryption as 9 micro Joules and the
energy requirement for hashing that is required for the key
derivation using the group key and the device IDs is 0.045
micro Joules per bit (100 micro watt Hour/ MB, SHA-256)
[14] . Table II illustrates the details of the data exchange
between the HMS and devices in the groups. Using these
details and the energy requirements for each activity, we can
calculate the total energy required.
We assume a smart home with about 40 Group 1 devices
with an average of 10 operations per device per day and about
20 Group 2 devices sending usage data every 15 minutes and
receiving a total of 20 control operations a day. For this
monitoring and control regime, we estimate the energy
utilisation for the Group 1 and Group 2 devices as well as the
Group Controllers to compare the battery life times.
Fig 4 provides a pattern of the energy utilisation over a
hundred days. The Group 1 devices use less than 1 Joule;
Group 2 devices use about 2.2 Joules. The group controller 1
uses about 14 Joules whereas the group controller 2, which is
the most loaded, uses about 70 Joules in all (~ 20 years on a
1200 mAh battery). The actual energy utilisation will change
with the monitoring and control regime, but the pattern will be
somewhat similar since the group controller 2 will handle the
largest amount of load. The energy utilisation of the HMS is
not of concern since it does not lack resources. Table III is a
reckoner for the data sizes and the operational security
parameters.
TABLE III. OPERATIONAL PARAMETERS OF THE DATA EXCHANGE
BETWEEN THE HMS AND THE DEVICES
Data Exchange Data Size
Data Size Data Exchanged
Variables Transferred
Node ID 16 bits
D = ID + CMD +
144 bits
TIME
8 Chars = 64
Command (CMD) S = D + TIME 208 bits
bits
S = D + TIME +
Data (DATA) 64 bits 272 bits
Rand
Time Stamp 8 Chars = 64 D = ID + DATA + 144 bits
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 2014 6th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference (CEEC) University of Essex, UK

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