Smart Home Personal Assistants: A Security and Privacy Review

Abstract

Smart Home Personal Assistants (SPA) are an emerging innovation that is changing the means by which home users interact with technology. However, there are a number of elements that expose these systems to various risks: i) the open nature of the voice channel they use, ii) the complexity of their architecture, iii) the AI features they rely on, and iv) their use of a wide range of underlying technologies. This paper presents an in-depth review of the security and privacy issues in SPA, categorizing the most important attack vectors and their countermeasures. Based on this, we discuss open research challenges that can help steer the community to tackle and address current security and privacy issues in SPA. One of our key findings is that even though the attack surface of SPA is conspicuously broad and there has been a significant amount of recent research efforts in this area, research has so far focused on a small part of the attack surface, particularly on issues related to the interaction between the user and the SPA devices. We also point out that further research is needed to tackle issues related to authorization, speech recognition or profiling, to name a few. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to conduct such a comprehensive review and characterization of the security and privacy issues and countermeasures of SPA.

Threats to Journalists from the Consumer Internet of Things

“…This ongoing access to information presents the dual issues of both identification of individuals and profiling, i.e. compiling and analysing data on the journalist and their identified sources [14,37,80]. Hypothetical consequences.…”

Personalized Intelligent Voice Assistant Anna for Speech Recognition Using Natural Language Processing

“…Many researches were done to crack open the device using voice directions into the voice assistant by using ultrasonic waves that also helps in answering the calls on the cellphone easily [19].When the hardware attacks take place on the cloud where the device information is stored. [3]. Whereas past studies, merchant investigations, and IT press looks to concentrate on hardware attacks, the results from a user perspective appear to be relegated to associate implicit circumstance.…”

“…Users of smart speakers are asked to play music, get the weather forecast, or set a timer or an alarm. [3]Advancements are taking place a lot now in home improvement in Natural language processing and are resulting in development of highly performing networking models since the beginning of 21 st century. [4].…”

Hey Alexa what did I just type? Decoding smartphone sounds with a voice assistant

“…Recent work has highlighted privacy threats from always-on voice assistants. They have been extensively researched both in academia [1,16,24,11,5,2,19] and by the media [15]. Dubois et al [10] analysed misactivations with newscasts and TV shows and found 0.95 per hour, lasting for at least 10s.…”