University of Victoria

Published purpose

Due to the significant advances achieved in medical knowledge and healthcare delivery, the world’s aging population has been growing considerably in the last decade. An aging population means increased spending in healthcare, pension, and social benefits programs. To alleviate the aforementioned costs, a new trend is to leverage emerging smart home Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to enable elderly people to age and live independently in their home as long as PAGE 5 they can take care of themselves. While a wide range of technological support based on IoT that allow seniors to age in place (AiP) are now available, limited attention has been paid to the security and privacy risks posed by these technologies. The objective of this project is to establish trust and confidence in aging technology and solutions by carrying out three complementary activity groups. The first set of activities consists of conducting a systematic analysis of the security and privacy threats created by aging in place technologies, and developing a new platform to monitor, detect, and respond to these threats. The second set of activities consists of designing and implementing a threatdriven approach for dynamic security testing of aging in place platforms. The third set of activities consists of designing secure and privacy-preserving protocols to secure AiP IoT data collection, transmission, sharing, and processing. The sum of these activities will provide a robust framework to prevent, detect, and mitigate security and privacy threats targeted at elderly people relying on IoT devices to age in place.