An Englishman’s home is his castle, or so goes the saying. The extent to which an Englishman’s smart home is his smart castle, we don’t yet know.
Where devices using artificial intelligence (AI) are already available, promises and expectations paint a future where technology “merges physical and virtual worlds, creating smart environments to improve lives and enhance wellbeing” (European Commission H2020 Digital Agenda). The distance between our physical and virtual worlds shrinks, but concerns for security, privacy and trust in these technologies grow in similar measures. Successfully addressing these concerns not only demands specific technological dispositions but also targeted interventions at the level of the individual, the user, at the heart of this system.
As a follow up to the €1.5M EU project “Cocoon: Emotion psychology meets Cyber Security” (2016-2020), which measured and establised how users of connected Internet-of-Things devices react to cyber security risks, the £2.4M UK EPSRC project “CHAI: Cyber Hygiene in AI-enabled domestic life” (2020-2023) will examine the particular threats posed by AI. CHAI addresses the challenge of how to help users protect themselves against the security risks they will face in AI enabled domestic environments.
We move beyond preventive approaches to security education to equip users with problem-solving skills to diagnose, analyse and respond to a security breach. In particular:
  1. we identify AI security risks in domestic environments;
  2. we identify correlates between psycho-social characteristics of users that determine their susceptibility to risk and influence their decision making;
  3. we co-design and evaluate explainable AI approaches;
  4. we develop personalised cyber hygiene training for AI security risks.