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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/P016278/1
Title: UPRISE-IoT: User-centric PRIvacy & Security in IoT
Principal Investigator: Musolesi, Professor M
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Geography
Organisation: UCL
Scheme: Standard Research - NR1
Starts: 01 January 2017 Ends: 30 June 2021 Value (£): 340,791
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human-Computer Interactions Information & Knowledge Mgmt
Mobile Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
The goal of this project is to allow users to gain control over data generated and collected by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices surrounding them. Since the IoT will be omnipresent in our day-to-day activities, our privacy is potentially at risk. At the same time, the deployment of IoT technologies might be stopped or slowed-down if privacy is not considered from the beginning as a fundamental design objective. In general, for these reasons, we believe that it is essential to adopt a privacy-by-design approach for the IoT.

This project will take a fresh look at the IoT privacy space by considering a user-centric approach. It will be user-centric by considering user's behaviour and context in order to improve security and privacy in a privacy-preserving manner. The approach will also increase data transparency and control. Users will be informed about the data that is being collected in a user-friendly manner, and will have the option to oppose to its collection. We plan to develop a solution that will offer tools for controlling data privacy in the IoT world. Therefore, we believe that the project will raise a new awareness in the users, so that users' behaviour will not compromise their security, favouring also the creation of a new market based on the monetization of IoT data.

The expected result is the creation of a new secure space centred around the user where security solutions are either integrated within IoT devices directly (creating smart secure objects) or made available to the user by powerful user-friendly mobile applications for: (i) "smartifying" the IoT devices that are not intrinsically secure, (ii) fine-tuning the level of privacy; (iii) getting awareness of their behaviour for being protected from security and privacy threats, (iv) getting awareness of the value of their information.

We will validate our results with experimental work involving users. We plan to adopt a mixed quantitative/qualitative approach to the problem: we will both survey users' perception of security, as well as measure the real level of protection of users' data.
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