Dirk Wiese, Parliamentary Secretary of State in the BMWi, Wolfgang Niedziella, Managing Director of the VDE Institute, and Ansgar Hinz, Chairman of the VDE Board, visiting the Smart Home Laboratory.
| VDE"Launched five years ago in the course of the Smart Home project sponsored by the BMWi, the Smart Home Laboratory is now developing further towards Smart Living and Industry 4.0," explains Dr. Siegfried Pongratz, Head of Smart Technologies at the VDE Institute. On the live system, the VDE experts demonstrate tests for information security, data protection and functional safety. A smart, internet-connected washing machine serves as a model. In case of an insufficiently protected device, as it is the case in the live demo, functional safety elements can be influenced by a simulated hacker attack. Thus, during the demonstration, the door of the washing machine can be opened during operation- a danger for the appliance and the user: "In a case of a washing machine, the damage caused by such an attack is manageable. For critical infrastructures, such an incident would have quite different effects", Dr. Pongratz points out.
On the basis of a smart-home-capable washing machine, the VDE experts also explained the newly created cloud-based test platform – Test Suite 2.0. It can be used to test up to ten different network systems and technologies at the same time for interoperability, such as smart home systems or applications in the field of e-mobility. "In the Test Suite 2.0, during the development process our experts conduct a remote-controlled verification of the conformity and interoperability of the respective product, based on defined use-case scenarios" explains Dr. Pongratz. Since there are currently no general standards in the smart home sector, the VDE Institute is developing test provisions for information security and data protection, which in turn are then incorporated into standardization.