Cocoon (FP7 CHIST-ERA EP/P016448/1, 2016-20) understanding how it feels to be hacked

Cocoon (2016-20) was a €1.2M project funded by the EU FP7 CHIST-ERA funding scheme. It was an interdisciplinary collaboration between the University of Greenwich (UK), Ghent University (BE), the Technical University in Eindhoven (NL), ETH Zurich (CH), and the University of Reading (UK, Coordinator).

Home is a safe haven to experience privacy, control, personal autonomy and integrity. Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology merges physical and virtual worlds, creating smart home environments that enhance wellbeing. As the physical and the virtual grow closer, however, concerns for security, privacy and trust grow in similar measures. Addressing these concerns requires technological dispositions and interventions aligned with the individuals who are at the frontline when things go wrong.

We weaved innovations in two distinctly different disciplines, emotion psychology and cyber security, to understand and improve the security of IoT technology. We aimed to produce an understanding of the psychology of IoT users, assess risks of mainstream and future IoT systems, and formulate provisions for the design and integration of user-centric IoT in tomorrow’s homes.

Some of the things we did

• Budimir, S., Fontaine, J. R. J., Huijts, N., Haans, A., Loukas, G. & Roesch, E. B. (2021). Emotional reactions on cybersecurity breach situations: A Scenario-based Survey Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 23(5):e24879. doi: 10.2196/24879.
• Budimir, S., Fontaine, J. R. J., Huijts, N., Haans, A., Loukas, G. & Roesch, E. B. (2020) Emotions, personality, and psychopathology of cybersecurity breach victims. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. 24(9). doi: 10.1089/cyber.2020.0525.
• Dubuc, T., Stahl, F. & Roesch, E. B. (2020). Mapping the Big Data landscape: technologies, platforms and paradigms for real-time analytics of data stream. EEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 15351-15374. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3046132.
• Heartfield, R., Loukas, G., Budimir, S., Bezemskij, A., Fontaine, J. R. J., Filippoupolitis, A. & Roesch, E. B. (2018). A taxonomy of cyber-physical threats and impact in the smart home. Computers and Security, 78. pp. 398-428. doi: 10.1016/j.cose.2018.07.011.