The Korea Land & Housing Corporation (LH) has adopted the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) secure cloud-connected technology as the foundation for its national smart home platform to overcome IoT security, privacy and interoperability problems.

The initiative enhances residents’ living experiences through access to smart healthcare, intelligent safety systems, convenience through automation, and improved energy management and control.

“We have made it our mission for all public housing to adopt smart homes,” said Jin Meong Eo, LH director. “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 analyses IoT big data. It also features built-in fine dust and CO₂ sensors, and helps residents control 15 different types of device via an OCF-compliant smart-home app. The goal is to expand into public housing, with more than 223,000 households estimated by 2025.

“Connecting IoT cloud environments with a range of devices and device types presents significant security, privacy and interoperability challenges,” said Mark Trayer, chairman of the OCF board of directors. “This is limiting consumers’ options and hindering market expansion. As governments work to connect infrastructure, proprietary IoT 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 and IEC specifications, including the Secure IP Device Framework, its open-source reference implementation, and an industry-recognised certification programme. All this enables secure end-to-end implementations that encompass device-to-device, device-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud. The technology can foster competition, facilitate productivity and drive innovation while aiding secure deployments with rapid development and simple integrations with IP networks and non-IP systems.

The OCF is a global, member-driven technical standards development organisation. Its more than 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.

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