HomeSnitch: Behavior Transparency and Control for Smart Home IoT Devices

TJ O'Connor, Reham Mohamed, Markus Miettinen, William Enck, Bradley Reaves, and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, 2019

A network-level system classifies encrypted smart home IoT traffic into semantic behaviors with over 99% accuracy, enabling transparency without payload inspection.

Abstract

The widespread adoption of smart home IoT devices has led to a broad and heterogeneous market with �awed security designs and privacy concerns. While the quality of IoT device software is unlikely to be �xed soon, there is great potential for a network-based solution that helps protect and inform consumers. Unfortunately, the encrypted and proprietary protocols used by devices limit the value of traditional network-based monitoring techniques. In this paper, we present H��S��, a building block for enhancing smart home transparency and control by classifying IoT device communication by semantic behavior (e.g., heartbeat, �rmware check, motion detection). H��S�� ignores payload content (which is often encrypted) and instead identi�es behaviors using features of connection-oriented application data unit exchanges, which represent application-layer dialog between clients and servers. We evaluate H��S�� against an independent labeled corpus of IoT device network �ows and correctly detect over 99% of behaviors. We further deployed H��S�� in a home environment and empirically evaluated its ability to correctly classify known behaviors as well as discover new behaviors. Through these e�orts, we demonstrate the utility of network-level services to classify behaviors of and enforce control on smart home devices.

Citation (IEEE)

T. O’Connor, R. Mohamed, M. Miettinen, W. Enck, B. Reaves, and A. Sadeghi, “HomeSnitch: Behavior Transparency and Control for Smart Home IoT Devices,” in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, 2019.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{omm+19,
  author = {{O'Connor}, TJ and Mohamed, Reham and Miettinen, Markus and Enck, William and {Bradley Reaves} and Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza},
  booktitle = {{Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks}},
  date = {2019-05},
  title = {{HomeSnitch}: Behavior Transparency and Control for Smart Home {IoT} Devices},
}