Smart grids offer better energy management at consumer premises as well as energy companies side using bi- directional communication and control. Energy companies can balance energy supply and demand to a large extent, with the advent of smart homes. They can also nudge consumers to shift their demands to off-peak hours for load balancing and monetary benefits. We propose a decentralized demand scheduling algorithm that minimizes consumer discomfort and electricity cost of a household. Our algorithm utilizes only aggregated energy consumption of a household to derive optimal appliance level demand schedules. Furthermore, a low-complexity energy disaggregation algorithm is proposed to derive fine- grained appliance information and consumer preferences. We propose three important coefficients related to energy usage of consumers. We utilize them to derive optimal day- ahead demand schedules. The decentralized algorithm is empirically evaluated using real-world energy usage data from open datasets, which include our own deployment. Our proposed scheduling algorithm saves up to 30% energy cost. This work is one of the first to derive day-ahead schedules using real-world data from multiple households.@en

DNSSEC offers protection against spoofing of DNS data by providing origin authentication, ensuring data integrity and authentication of non-existence by using public-key cryptography. Although the relevance of securing a technology as crucial to the Internet as DNS is obvious, the DNSSEC implementation increases the complexity of the deployed DNS infrastructure, which may result in misconfiguration. In this article, we measure and analyze the misconfigurations for domains in six zones (.bg, .br, .co, .com, .nl and .se). Furthermore, we categorize these misconfigurations and provide an explanation for their possible causes. Finally, we evaluate the effects of misconfigurations on the reachability of a zone’s network. Our results show that, although progress has been made in the implementation of DNSSEC, over 4 % of evaluated domains show misconfigurations. The domains with the most frequently appearing misconfiguration are often hosted at a very limited set of hosting providers. Of these misconfigured domains, almost 75 % were unreachable from a DNSSEC-aware resolver. This illustrates that although the authorities of a domain may think their DNS is secured, it is in fact not. Worse still, misconfigured domains are at risk of being unreachable from the clients who care about and implement DNSSEC verification, while the publisher may remain unaware of the error and its consequences.@en