Securing Consumer IoT in the Smart Home: Architecture, Challenges, and Countermeasures

The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) platforms are gaining high popularity. However, due to the open nature of wireless communications, smart home platforms are facing many new challenges, especially in the aspect of security and privacy. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of current popular smart home platforms and elaborate the functions of each component. Then we discuss the security and privacy challenges arising from these platforms and review the state of the art of the proposed countermeasures. We give a comprehensive survey on several new attacks on the voice interface of smart home platforms, which aim to gain unauthorized access and execute over-privileged behaviors to compromise the user's privacy. To thwart these attacks, we propose a novel voice liveness detection system, which analyzes the wireless signals generated by IoT devices and the received voice samples to perform user authentication. We implement a real-world testbed on Samsung's SmartThings platform to evaluate the performance of the proposed system, and demonstrate its effectiveness.