Cross-App Interference Threats in Smart Homes: Categorization, Detection and Handling

Haotian Chi, Qiang Zeng, Xiaojiang Du, Jiaping Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

62 Scopus citations

Abstract

Internet of Thing platforms prosper home automation applications (apps). Prior research concerns intra-app security. Our work reveals that automation apps, even secured individually, still cause a family of threats when they interplay, termed as Cross-App Interference (CAI) threats. We systematically categorize such threats and encode them using satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). We present HomeGuard, a system for detecting and handling CAI threats in real deployments. A symbolic executor is built to extract rule semantics, and instrumentation is utilized to capture configuration during app installation. Rules and configuration are checked against SMT models, the solutions of which indicate the existence of corresponding CAI threats. We further combine app functionalities, device attributes and CAI types to label the risk level of CAI instances. In our evaluation, HomeGuard discovers 663 CAI instances from 146 SmartThings market apps, imposing minor latency upon app installation and no runtime overhead.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2020
Pages411-423
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781728158099
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2020
Event50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2020 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: 29 Jun 20202 Jul 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2020

Conference

Conference50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2020
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period29/06/202/07/20

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Cross-App Interference Threats in Smart Homes: Categorization, Detection and Handling'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this