Authenticating Smart Home Devices via Home Limited Channels

Abstract

Nowadays, most Internet of Things devices in smart homes rely on radio frequency channels for communication, making them exposed to various attacks such as spoofing and eavesdropping attacks. Existing methods using encryption keys may be inapplicable on these resource-constrained devices that cannot afford the computationally expensive encryption operations. Thus, in this article, we design a key-free communication method for such devices in a smart home. In particular, we introduce the Home-limited Channel (HLC) that can be accessed only within a house yet inaccessible for outside-house attackers. Utilizing HLCs, we propose HlcAuth, a challenge-response mechanism to authenticate the communications between smart devices without keys. The advantages of HlcAuth are low cost, lightweight as well as key-free, and requiring no human intervention. According to the security analysis, HlcAuth can defeat replay attacks, message-forgery attacks, and man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks, among others. We further evaluate HlcAuth in four different physical scenarios, and results show that HlcAuth achieves 100% true positive rate (TPR) within 4.2m for in-house devices while 0% false positive rate (FPR) for outside attackers, i.e., guaranteeing a high-level usability and security for in-house communications. Finally, we implement HlcAuth in both single-room and multi-room scenarios.

High-accuracy model recognition method of mobile device based on weighted feature similarity

“…If the kth extracted features of base device D i and target device D j are one-dimensional numerical features, the similarity between f (Dj,k) e and f (Di,k) e is calculated by (1).…”

“…In (1), ε is the measurement error threshold, and f (Di,k) e is the absolute value of numerical feature.…”

“…Mobile devices bring great convenience to users’ life. For instance, users can use their mobile device to perform online payment, watch videos, and even use the mobile device to control the home air conditioner remotely 1 . The convenience characteristic is also an important factor for the rapid growth of mobile devices.…”

A Survey on Resilience in the IoT

“…A further approach relies on controlling the flow of information for event-based IoT systems at the brokers to restrict which devices may communicate with each other [48]. The consideration of home-limited channels [71] that can be accessed only within a house yet remain inaccessible for attackers outside the house also provides an interesting application for authenticating devices in a smart home [71].…”