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Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on cheap hardware and the easy-to-use software Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Nowadays, because of its open-source nature and its simple and accessible user experience, Arduino is ubiquitous and used among hobbyist and novice programmers for Do It Yourself (DIY) projects, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Unfortunately, such diffusion comes with a price. Many developers start working on this platform without having a deep knowledge of the leading security concepts in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Their applications, often publicly available on GitHub (or other code-sharing platforms), can be taken as examples by other developers or downloaded and used by non-expert users, spreading these issues in other projects. For these reasons, this paper aims at understanding the current landscape by analyzing a set of open-source DIY IoT projects and looking for potential security issues. Furthermore, the paper classifies those issues according to the proper security category. This study’s results offer a deeper understanding of the security concerns in Arduino projects created by hobbyist programmers and the dangers that may be faced by those who use these projects.

From the software point of view, the development of IoT applications differs from other kinds of applications due to the specific features that the former exhibit. In this paper, we investigate how developers contribute to IoT applications in the Open Source Software (OSS) context, to gain a deeper understanding of how their work differs from that of non-IoT applications. To that end, we conducted a quantitative analysis of a broad set of the 60 most popular publicly available IoT and non-IoT projects on GitHub. By comparing how developers contribute to these projects, our analysis provides insight into the purpose and characteristics of the code, the behavior of the contributors, and the maturity of the IoT software development ecosystem. Results reveal significant differences between IoT and non-IoT application development, in terms of how applications are realized, in the diversity of developers' specializations, and in how code is reused. This work provides evidence about some Open Source IoT software development peculiarities to be considered by future research efforts aimed at better satisfying software engineering needs in the IoT scenario.

Nowadays, several interfaces for end-user development (EUD) empower end users to jointly program the behavior of their smart devices and online services, typically through trigger-action rules. Despite their popularity, such interfaces often expose too much functionality and force the user to search among a large number of supported technologies disposed of confused grid menus. This paper contributes to the EUD with the aim of interactively assisting end users in composing IF-THEN rules with an optimizer in the loop. The goal, in particular, is to automatically redesign the layout of the EUD interfaces to facilitate the users in defining triggers and actions. For this purpose, we define a predictive model to characterize the composition of trigger-action rules on the basis of their final functionality, we adopt different optimization algorithms to explore the design space, and c) we present EUDoptimizer, the integration of our approach in IFTTT, one of the most popular EUD interfaces. We demonstrate that good layout solutions can be obtained in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, an empirical evaluation with 12 end users shows evidence that EUDoptimizer reduces the efforts needed to compose trigger-action rules.

Being able to play games in early years is very important for the development of children. Even though, children with physical disabilities encounter several obstacles that exclude them from engaging in many popular games. In particular, children with severe motor disabilities that rely on one-switch interfaces for accessing electronic devices find dynamic video games completely unplayable. In this paper we present the development and evaluation of GNomon: a framework, based on the NOMON interaction modality, that enables the creation of dynamic one-switch games for children with severe motor disabilities. The framework was designed following a series of guidelines elicited in close collaboration with a team of speech therapists, physiotherapists and psychologists from one of the Local Health Agencies in Turin, Italy. Likewise, three mini games were developed for testing the playability of GNomon-based games. Finally, we conducted a series of trials with 8 children with severe motor disabilities assisted by the health agency, in which we found that all of them enjoyed playing the GNomon- based mini games and that 7 of them were able to interact and play autonomously.

The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers. This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools.