Communications of the ACM

tion in dependability and engineering of trustworthy systems, notably through the ARTEMIS and ECSEL private-public partnerships. Example projects include Pegasus, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and involving all major German OEMs and Tier 1 companies to produce mechanisms to test and formally verify autonomous vehicles. And SCOTT is examining frameworks to enable development of secure and connected trustworthy things primarily for the rail-transport industries. 35 Separately, the TrustLite security framework from the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (a collaboration of TU Darmstadt, University of Helsinki, and other European security institutes) have produced an Execution-Aware Memory Protection Unit that provides programmable operating system-independent isolation of software modules at runtime for low-cost embedded devices.

IoT/CPS systems are constantly
monitoring homes, factories, cars,
and more, and while understanding
these processes can make them more
efficient, sustainable, and safe, they
can expose privacy concerns. The most
prominent European initiative affect-
ing IoT/CPS data gathering is that of
the General Data Protection Regula-
tion (GDPR) regarding data protection
for individuals in the EU and its eco-
nomic area. 36 The European approach
to privacy is that, through GDPR, all the
requirements of data domains and ter-
ritories are consolidated into a single
coherent and well-defined regulation.
One aspect of this is that a data owner
must prove its data protection reason-
ably matches the current state of the art,
which in turn uniquely drives practical
anonymization research. Researchers
aim to demonstrate privacy shortfalls
to make schemes more robust. For ex-
ample, U.K. and Belgium researchers37
were able to prove it took only four lo-
cation points to be able to uniquely
identify someone 95% of the time and
that data coarsening and noise addi-
tion do not help. This was followed by
Gadotti et al., 23 who showed privacy
techniques using “sticky noise” could
be easily infiltrated. All European citi-
zens, as well as those only visiting Eu-
rope, are covered by GDPR, meaning its
effect reaches much farther than just
Europe.

Conclusion

We have drawn out three views of IoT/CPS systems the European approach to research contributes to in its own unique way, though European researchers continue to collaborate across the globe to address the many challenges associated with these systems. This subject continues to grow and, with it, new problems. For example, as such systems contribute to the autonomy of cars, water networks, precision farms, and more, the more we need to be able to understand how to engineer them and provide guarantees regarding their operation. However, as we do not fully understand how digital systems interact with the physical world, we do not yet have such guarantees. We thus need a science of cyber-physical interaction; related design principles will then emerge, much as they have in other engineering disciplines. Given the importance of the communications substructure for such systems, the jury is still out as to which protocol (or set) will win.

There are many players in the LPWA game, but the big question is what will be the effect of the promised 5G suite of solutions? Finally, as these systems take more control of our lives, their ethical approach is key, including the ability to maintain privacy while still being useful. Indeed, their security is of paramount importance, as being able to hack a water network or autonomous vehicle could mean disaster. There is plenty of research for Europe and beyond to consider.

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Julie A. McCann is a professor of computer systems in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London, U.K.

Gian Pietro Picco is a professor in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento, Italy.

Alex Gluhak is head of technology at Digital Catapult, Guildford, U.K.,

Karl Henrik Johansson is a professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Martin Törngren is a professor of embedded control systems in the Department of Machine Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Laila Gide is Past-President, ARTEMIS Industry Association, and Past-Director, Advanced Studies Europe in the Corporate Strategy, Marketing and Technical Directorate, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.