TY - JOUR
T1 - Privacy Leakage in Smart Homes and Its Mitigation
T2 - IFTTT as a Case Study
AU - Xu, Rixin
AU - Zeng, Qiang
AU - Zhu, Liehuang
AU - Chi, Haotian
AU - Du, Xiaojiang
AU - Guizani, Mohsen
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - The combination of smart home platforms and automation apps introduce many conveniences to smart home users. However, this also brings the potential of privacy leakage. If a smart home platform is permitted to collect all the events of a user day and night, then the platform will learn the behavior patterns of this user before long. In this paper, we investigate how IFTTT, one of the most popular smart home platforms, has the capability of monitoring the daily life of a user in a variety of ways that are hardly noticeable. Moreover, we propose multiple ideas for mitigating privacy leakages, which all together form a 'Filter-and-Fuzz' (FF) process: first, it filters out events unneeded by the IFTTT platform. Then, it fuzzifies the values and frequencies of the remaining events. We evaluate the FF process and the results show that the proposed solution makes the IFTTT unable to recognize any of the user's behavior patterns.
AB - The combination of smart home platforms and automation apps introduce many conveniences to smart home users. However, this also brings the potential of privacy leakage. If a smart home platform is permitted to collect all the events of a user day and night, then the platform will learn the behavior patterns of this user before long. In this paper, we investigate how IFTTT, one of the most popular smart home platforms, has the capability of monitoring the daily life of a user in a variety of ways that are hardly noticeable. Moreover, we propose multiple ideas for mitigating privacy leakages, which all together form a 'Filter-and-Fuzz' (FF) process: first, it filters out events unneeded by the IFTTT platform. Then, it fuzzifies the values and frequencies of the remaining events. We evaluate the FF process and the results show that the proposed solution makes the IFTTT unable to recognize any of the user's behavior patterns.
KW - IFTTT
KW - SmartThings
KW - privacy leakage
KW - smart home
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85066425420&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85066425420&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2911202
DO - 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2911202
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85066425420
VL - 7
SP - 63457
EP - 63471
JO - IEEE Access
JF - IEEE Access
M1 - 8704324
ER -