Cybersecurity for smart homes
CaSER-Safe Project
CaSER-Safe Project
Collaborative Assessment of Security and Robustness of Smart Home as Safety Critical Environments. CaSER-Safe evaluates how CyberSecDome tools can strengthen the cybersecurity posture of the Smartotum smart-home framework in a real operational setting.
Project overview
CaSER-Safe applies threat detection, dynamic risk assessment, incident response, collaborative threat intelligence sharing, and immersive visualization to a real Smartotum deployment. The project focuses on practical cybersecurity evaluation in a distributed smart-home environment managing comfort, energy efficiency, privacy, and physical security.
Smart Home
Cybersecurity
Horizon
Europe
CyberSecDome
Cascade Funding
Real Smart Home
Testbed
At a glance
8 months
Project duration
79 devices
Real
testbed
assets
1 beneficiary
SMARTOTUM srl
2 hubs
Distributed
Smartotum
deployment
About the project
CaSER-Safe investigates the cybersecurity of Smartotum, a distributed smart-home framework that manages lighting, shutters, heating and cooling, cameras, energy monitoring, and intrusion-related functionalities. The project evaluates CyberSecDome technologies on a real smart-home deployment and studies how AI-supported security tools can improve detection, risk assessment, and incident handling.
The project combines practical experimentation, realistic attack scenarios, and pilot-oriented validation activities in a live smart-home environment.
Why it matters
Smart homes are cyber-physical systems: successful cyberattacks can affect not only data and privacy, but also comfort, safety, and the operation of physical devices. CaSER-Safe addresses this challenge by testing whether advanced cybersecurity tooling can be meaningfully applied to a heterogeneous residential IoT ecosystem.
Objectives
Assess vulnerabilities
Identify relevant weaknesses and attack scenarios affecting the Smartotum framework in realistic deployment conditions.
Evaluate risk
Use dynamic risk assessment to understand how cyber threats may affect digital assets, physical devices, and home services.
Support response
Test whether CyberSecDome incident detection and orchestration tools can identify attacks and support mitigation workflows.
Enable CTI sharing
Design a collaborative threat intelligence workflow that supports secure and privacy-aware exchange of cybersecurity-relevant information.
Improve situational awareness
Evaluate immersive visualization approaches to make cybersecurity posture, assets, and risks easier to interpret in spatial context.
Real smart-home testbed
The project uses a real two-floor detached house equipped with the Smartotum framework. The deployment includes two Smartotum Hubs, a broad set of sensors and actuators, cameras, heating-related devices, lighting modules, and connected environmental monitoring components.
The testbed is designed to reflect realistic operating conditions and to support both benign usage and controlled attack scenarios.
Representative device categories
- Smart hubs and distributed gateways
- Temperature, humidity and CO₂ sensors
- Smart switches, dimmers and shutter modules
- Door/window contacts and motion sensors
- Cameras, video door phones and sirens
- Energy metering and climate-control devices
Project workflow
WP2
Initial cybersecurity assessment
Threat modelling and baseline analysis of Smartotum vulnerabilities, attack surfaces, and exposure assumptions.
WP3
Risk assessment and detection
Asset registration, Dynamic Risk Assessment evaluation, collection of network datasets, and testing of incident detection components.
WP4
Incident response
Evaluation of CyberSecDome DAIR and SOAR components on staged denial-of-service scenarios collected from the real testbed.
WP5
CTI sharing and immersive visualization
Design of a privacy-aware CTI sharing framework and evaluation of the CyberSecDome VR interface in the Smartotum environment.
Key results
Risk and vulnerability analysis
CaSER-Safe established a structured baseline of Smartotum cybersecurity exposure, including architectural weaknesses, realistic threat models, and dynamic risk analysis activities on the real testbed.
Incident detection pipeline
Network traffic datasets collected on the Smartotum Hub were used to evaluate CyberSecDome incident detection and orchestration tools in realistic denial-of-service scenarios.
CTI sharing framework
A collaborative threat intelligence sharing approach was defined around local collection, controlled transformation, and privacy-aware exchange of cybersecurity-relevant data.
VR cybersecurity visualization
The CyberSecDome VR interface was evaluated on the Smartotum real smart-home testbed, showing the value of spatially contextualized cybersecurity information.
Expected impact
For Smartotum
Better understanding of cybersecurity posture, integration challenges, and opportunities for future hardening of the smart-home framework.
For CyberSecDome
Validation of project components against a real cyber-physical residential deployment with heterogeneous IoT devices.
For the ecosystem
Evidence that collaborative security tooling, risk analysis, and immersive visualization can be meaningfully explored in smart-home environments.
Funding acknowledgment: CaSER-Safe is supported under the CyberSecDome cascade funding framework. CyberSecDome has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101120779.
