Industry leadership from Korea Land and Housing Corporation overcomes significant IoT security, privacy and interoperability challenges with OCF

07 December, 2021 – The Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) has adopted the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) secure cloud-connected technology as the foundation for its national Smart Home Platform. This has helped LH to overcome significant IoT security, privacy and interoperability challenges. The initiative enhances residents’ living experiences through access to smart healthcare, intelligent safety systems, greater convenience through automation and improved energy management and control. All of this is achieved through the convenience and automation of the LH Smart Home.

Jin Meong Eo, Director of the Korea Land and Housing Corporation, adds: “We have made it our mission for all public housing to adopt smart homes. This is not only a response to the government’s digital policies. We are working to continue Korea’s leadership in innovation for the good of society. We are opening up access to healthcare, making living environments safer and saving energy to protect the world around us. OCF is one of the key components in helping us to achieve this in a secure, scalable way and that is why we chose OCF in our project.”

A secure- and private-by-design IoT smart hub in each home collects and analyzes IoT big data. It also features built-in fine dust and CO2 sensors, and helps residents to control 15 different types of device via an OCF-compliant Smart Home app. Based on this project, the goal is to continue to expand into public housing, with more than 223,000 households estimated by 2025.

Mr. Mark Trayer, Chairman of the OCF Board of Directors, comments: “Connecting IoT cloud environments with a range of devices and device types presents significant security, privacy and interoperability challenges. This is limiting consumers’ options and hindering market expansion. As governments work to connect infrastructure, proprietary IoT solutions can’t meet their requirements. Delivering a smart home service like this at scale both answers these challenges while improving tenants’ lives. This is true leadership from LH, and a model that can be replicated elsewhere.”

OCF collaborates with the IoT ecosystem to deploy and evolve the OCF ISO/IEC specifications, including the Secure IP Device Framework, its open-source reference implementation, and an industry-recognized certification program. All of this enables secure end-to-end implementations that encompass device-to-device, device-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud. The technology fosters competition, facilitates productivity, and drives innovation while aiding secure deployments with rapid development and simple integrations with IP networks and non-IP systems.

For more information on Open Connectivity Foundation and the Secure IP Device Framework, please visit: www.openconnectivity.org.

About Open Connectivity Foundation

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) is a global, member-driven technical standards development organization. Its 500+ members are working to enable trust, interoperability, and secure communication between IP-connected IoT devices and services. It does this by fostering collaboration between stakeholders across the IoT ecosystem to deliver the freely-available ISO/IEC specifications, including the Secure IP Device Framework, its open-source reference implementation, and an industry-recognized certification program. This enables innovative new secure use cases and user experiences, reduces development costs, integration complexity and time to market, and simplifies regulatory compliance to IoT security and privacy baselines.

OCF members work across the enterprise layers of infrastructure, applications, and data. They collaborate to co-create and deploy systems in an open and standardized way, enabling devices to communicate over IP, regardless of form factor, operating system, service provider, transport technology, or ecosystem.

The vertical-agnostic technology has already seen significant adoption in the smart home sector and is now enabling the transition to secure, intelligent, Building Automation Systems (BAS) based on IP connectivity networks.

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There’s about 26 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices today. All too many of` them have no compatibility with each other. The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) wants to fix that with its OCF’s 2.1 specification. This is more than just another standard. At CES 2020, numerous companies showed off their beta OCF compatible devices.

The OCF 2.1 specification is meant to enable the development of vertical IoT devices for both smart homes and smart commercial devices while maintaining fundamental interoperability between device architectures. It’s meant to be scalable from resource-constrained to resource-rich devices.

The OCF architecture is based on the Resource Orientated REST architectural style. It’s also designed to bridge the gap between existing IoT ecosystems. So, it provides detailed implementations for Bluetooth, EnOcean, Zigbee, and Z-wave network protocols.

Read the full article by Steven J. Vaughan -Nichols via ZDNet.