INTERNET OF THINGS
Q&A WITH CRAIG CHAPMAN:
KEEPING SMART BUILDINGS SAFE
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To gain an understanding of some of the security issues faced by the smart buildings sector, ECD spoke to Craig Chapman, Chairperson at the KNX National Group Australia. What are the biggest security threats to smart buildings at the moment? The biggest threat from a security perspective comes from homes and buildings that are directly connected to the public internet. A physical attack upon a home or building is much more of a challenge for any hacker, as opposed to sitting at their desk and performing a cyber attack against homes/buildings from a computer that is directly connected to the public internet. Even with unsecured wireless communications inside a home/ building, a hacker would need to be within the geographic vicinity in order to be able to eavesdrop on the installation, or to try to hack into and attack it. An obvious exception to the above is public buildings, such as hotels, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, etc, where it is
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really important within all publicly accessible areas for sensitive infrastructure and network equipment to be kept under lock and key (eg, within a locked distribution board and/or a locked room or cabinet). Nowadays, a lot of smart home/building networks and systems utilise a cloud connection for various remote access functions and connectivity. So, any communication between the cloud and the physical device network within the home/building is communicated over the public internet and stored within a cloud server. In general, it is always advisable that any communication over the public internet is performed using a VPN (virtual private network), or that data is offered via a web server installed in the home/building which is then accessed by a cloud server with TLS (Transport Layer Security).
JUNE 2023 - ECD [ELECTRICAL+COMMS+DATA] 17