A Study of Data Store-based Home Automation

Abstract

Home automation platforms provide a new level of convenience by enabling consumers to automate various aspects of physical objects in their homes. While the convenience is beneficial, security flaws in the platforms or integrated third-party products can have serious consequences for the integrity of a user's physical environment. In this paper we perform a systematic security evaluation of two popular smart home platforms, Google's Nest platform and Philips Hue, that implement home automation "routines" (i.e., trigger-action programs involving apps and devices) via manipulation of state variables in a centralized data store. Our semi-automated analysis examines, among other things, platform access control enforcement, the rigor of non-system enforcement procedures, and the potential for misuse of routines. This analysis results in ten key findings with serious security implications. For instance, we demonstrate the potential for the misuse of smart home routines in the Nest platform to perform a lateral privilege escalation, illustrate how Nest's product review system is ineffective at preventing multiple stages of this attack that it examines, and demonstrate how emerging platforms may fail to provide even bare-minimum security by allowing apps to arbitrarily add/remove other apps from the user's smart home. Our findings draw attention to the unique security challenges of platforms that execute routines via centralized data stores, and highlight the importance of enforcing security by design in emerging home automation platforms.

Towards a Natural Perspective of Smart Homes for Practical Security and Safety Analyses

“…A common trait of the home security/safety systems proposed by prior work [15], [8], [4], [10], [5], [16] is their reliance on policies for analysis or enforcement, which researchers generally specify based on their understanding of the home. For example, Soteria [4] has a policy which states that "the refrigerator and security system must always be on", which is motivated by the safety and security consequences of the two devices being OFF.…”

“…However, such an event may also be triggered by an adversary who can commandeer global state variables such as "awake/asleep", or "home/away". Indeed, our prior work [16] demonstrates how an attacker could manipulate such variables via compromised low-security devices, to indirectly control high-security devices. Finally, we also attempt to generate unnatural (i.e., unlikely) scenarios to mimic accidents or adversarial circumstances (Sec.…”

Tool Support for Risk-driven Planning of Trustworthy Smart IoT Systems within DevOps

“…There have been several successful attempt at hacking smart devices. Kafle et al [72] found SSL-vulnerabilities in popular smart home devices Nest and Philips Hue. Roy Solberg, a norwegian system developer, found that communication in the Mill smart heaters was unencrypted, which meant that anyone could control any internet connected heater [73].…”

Security Vetting Process of Smart-home Assistant Applications: A First Look and Case Studies

“…With the wide adoption of IoT devices, security and privacy have become a pressing issue [9,13,15,17,30,36,42,51,52]. A large body of existing works focuses on the security of software and firmware of the IoT devices [31,32,34], and measurements of IoT botnets [14,33].…”