In the HomeScan[2]  paper (in ICECCS 2018),  we highlight the importance of the security analysis of a smart home system from the integration perspective and propose a semi-automatic approach to perform the integration analysis. Later, an extended version [1] of this work was published in the 2019 TSE journal.

Why integration analysis?

Unlike the traditional ubiquitous smart home systems, the IoT (Internet of Things) driven smart home systems are more complex with the inherent attributes of IoT such as heterogeneity in technologies, standards, protocols, and platforms they are built upon while supporting a low-cost and a low-power system over the Internet.

The Figure shows the diversity of communication protocols and smart devices by different manufacturers supported by a smart home system that uses Smarthings hub.

The HomeScan paper suggests two factors which make securing of a smart home system challenging as incompatibilities and invalidated assumptions exist in a smart home system due to its complexity. Therefore, it highlights the requirement of analyzing the security of a smart home system from the integration perspective to discover insecurities arrises due to the challenges in providing security for smart home systems.

How to perform integration analysis?

The paper proposes HomeScan, a semi-automatic approach to perform a security analysis of a smart home system from the integration perspective. The idea is that, if you have a model (a finite state diagram) of the integrated system, you can perform model checking against different attack models to find security problems in the integrated system. Hence, the paper first provides a set of techniques to extract the model of the integrated system as a Labeled Transition System (LTS) from the available implementations. Next, it shows that reachability checking over the generated integrated system model can be used to find security problems in the smart home integration. For more information please refer to the Homescan [2] paper or its extended version [1].

References

[1] Scrutinizing Implementations of Smart Home Integrations. Kulani Mahadewa, Kailong Wang, Guangdong Bai, Ling Shi, Yan Liu, Jin Song Dong, and Zhenkai Liang. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, TSE 2019

[2] HOMESCAN: Scrutinizing Implementations of Smart Home Integrations. Kulani Mahadewa, Kailong Wang, Guangdong Bai, Ling Shi, Jin Song Dong and Zhenkai Liang. 23rd International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, ICECCS 2018, Melbourne, Australia, December 12-14, 2018