Security and Human-Centered Assessment of BACnet-Controlled DALI Infrastructure in an Educational Building Automation Testbed

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 12 Jun 2026] Security and Human-Centered Assessment of BACnet-Controlled DALI Infrastructure in an Educational Building Automation Testbed Ariton Verush Building automation and control systems integrate heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, sensing, and management functions through specialized communication protocols. While this integration enables flexible building operation, it also creates complex cyber-physical environments that are difficult to inspect, secure, and explain to new analysts. This paper presents a practical security and human-centered case study of a BACnet/IP building automation testbed with DALI lighting infrastructure, investigated during a domotics-oriented cybersecurity hackathon in Thun, Switzerland in April 2026. The study combines network-oriented enumeration, object-level inspection, physical rack analysis, and reflective HCI analysis of tool-supported learning. Using Yabe and BACteria, the work documents observable BACnet services, reconstructs structured object hierarchies, identifies room-level lighting-control paths, and maps BACnet objects to DALI group-level infrastructure. The analysis emphasizes that BACS assessment is not only a technical protocol task: it also requires usable tool interfaces, physical observability, interpretable naming conventions, and safe mental models for command priorities. The paper contributes a compact case study of BACnet/DALI exploration in an educational testbed and discusses implications for cybersecurity education, human-centered security tooling, and responsible experimentation in cyber-physical building environments. Comments: 7 pages, 9 figures, 1 table; technical case study Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2606.17089 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.17089v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.17089 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ariton Verush [view email] [v1] Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:18:12 UTC (5,778 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)