A Study of Smart Home Environment and its Security Threats

Abstract

As the world is moving towards Internet of Things, smart home is now rapidly becoming a reality. Home appliances and devices are interconnected, i.e., home area network, via proprietary or standard TCP/IP protocols allowing for better management and monitoring. Nevertheless, as with any form of network, smart home is also prone to security threats and vulnerabilities. This paper aims at presenting the importance of security in smart home environment. Herein, we will discuss (a) the concepts of smart home environment, (b) various smart home communication mechanisms, (c) security challenges and concerns in smart home environment, (d) security threats in smart home environment, (e) current security measures to encounter such security attacks and finally, conclusion and future work.

Internet of Things: A Scientometric Review

“…Nevertheless, security [91][92][93] and privacy [103,106,107] are major concerns for many applications such as smart home and grid. Cyber-Physical Systems is an application that, when powered by the IoT, enables the targets fixed by Industry 4.0 [111].…”

“…Similarly, Smart home has a linear growth, with 230 documents, and 111 in the last year, with China as the leading country. The most important related topics for Smart home are security [91][92][93], ZigBee [94][95][96], and activity recognition [97][98][99].…”

A Study of Smart Campus Environment and Its Security Attacks

“…The smart campus is based on a wide range of technologies and equipment including several unsecured devices, systems and applications that transmit information via unsafe media and use weak protocols such as HTTP, FTP, telnet, etc. The attackers can make use of these flaws to gain access to the systems, to retrieve sensitive data and to obtain confidential information for later manipulation (Rehman and Manickam, 2016). He can also damage the life of the devices and stop the functionality of the services.…”

“…The intruder can capture and store a copy of a legitimate request for service from a device on the smart campus network. Then, replay it to get services that are only authorized by the smart campus users (Rehman, Manickam, 2016).…”

“…Eavesdropping: This attack is against the confidentiality of smart campus environments and it is the most commonly recognized security threat in open systems (Rehman, Manickam, 2016). The idea behind Eavesdropping is that an attacker can monitor all data traffic on smart campus networks without the knowledge of authorized users (Rehman, Manickam, 2016). If we take the example of the RFID system, the readers and tags are wirelessly connected and communicated without any human intervention or encryption technique.…”