Characterizing Smart Home IoT Traffic in the Wild

Mazhar, M. Hammad; Shafiq, Zubair

doi:10.1109/iotdi49375.2020.00027

Cited by 46 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Mazhar et. al [10] characterize smart home IoT traffic in terms of its volume, temporal patterns, and external endpoints along with focusing on certain security and privacy concerns.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

BULWARK: A Framework to Store IoT Data in User Accounts

Reed

Tosun

2022

IEEE Access

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The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices raises serious concerns for a user's privacy and security because the existing software framework on these devices often support various default features and generate large data sets. Moreover, many IoT devices incorporate a manufacturer-owned cloud-based back-end support to process and store the generated data while simultaneously sharing with third parties. Clearly, in such an industry-driven environment with the desire to use the IoT data as a revenue stream, it is a challenge for users to control IoT data. Device manufacturers utilize an opaque software design where user data is generated and stored with little transparency. Manufacturers use EULAs as a legal construct to protect a manufacturer's legal standing and to explain a device's behavior, however this explanation is vague and lacks the necessary details for a user to determine a device's acceptable use and it has become increasingly difficult for users to secure and maintain their data. Fortunately, as the privacy minded user base of IoT devices grows, the manufacturers will be forced to implement a new framework that can enable users to have more control on the creation of their IoT data, and to store/disseminate such data in a secure and private manner. In this paper, we address this lack of transparency from manufacturers and address the issues of privacy and security by proposing a new framework called Bulwark, for manufacturer use on IoT devices and mobile applications. Proposed framework enables the user to generate and manage a set of data controlling rules, and store the result in their personal cloud account, while providing a dashboard data reporting tool enabling data transparency and supporting good user choices. The user's ability to access, disseminate and secure IoT generated data, is now available within our proposed framework. Using reverse engineering, simulation and implementation of open source solutions, we demonstrate support for a set of common devices. Each device executed the framework, while communicating with a mobile application and cloud services. Rules were generated for each message and telemetry was returned to the mobile application for dashboard rendering. We stored generated data in the cloud using our own account, while maintaining the free tier for each of the cloud services. Network usage increased between 4% and 9% while storage size grew between 0% and 2% larger, as compared to using the device without the framework. Our framework demonstrates support for a multitude of devices, by either open source or support for similar feature sets. This framework is easy to integrate and we anticipate wide spread adoption.

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“…Mazhar et. al [10] characterize smart home IoT traffic in terms of its volume, temporal patterns, and external endpoints along with focusing on certain security and privacy concerns.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

BULWARK: A Framework to Store IoT Data in User Accounts

Reed

Tosun

2022

IEEE Access

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“…This allowed for a large-scale analysis of the IoT ecosystem of end-users homes. Finally, Mazhar and Shafiq [12] studied IoT devices in the wild by using instrumented internet gateways deployed in over 200 homes and came up with a multidimensional characterization of observed IoT traffic.…”

Section: Field Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

SyntIoT: Privacy and security experimentation in consumer-oriented IoT ecosystems

Kosiński¹,

Scandariato²,

Fjeld³

2021

ICST Transactions on Security and Safety

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Since the advent of consumer-oriented IoT products, like smart homes, researchers have taken up the challenge of shielding the consumers from the risks this technology entails, including privacy harms. However, security and privacy research is 'hungry' for open data (e.g., about the network traffic patterns of the devices) and open platforms to validate IoT-related solutions outside a pure simulation environment. Except for the few cases seen in the related work, datasets are not readily available to the research community and are difficult to produce in-house. Also, the reproducibility of research results and open science is hindered by the lack of an open experimentation platform (to test privacy and security solutions) that also offers a fine-grained control of the experimental setup. We present SyntIoT, a platform that allows researchers to easily deploy a complete IoT ecosystem (including devices, users, vendor clouds) into the physical world and at a low cost, hence lowering the barriers to entry in this research field. SyntIoT can be used to collect field data and to realistically validate security and privacy solutions. Our platform uses synthetic IoT devices that are fully configurable in a declarative way. Interestingly, our platform also allows commercial devices to be deployed alongside the synthetic ones. The platform provides an infrastructure to monitor the ecosystem and to extract rich data, which can be used for empirical research and data mining. This paper presents the platform, explains how it meets established research needs not yet answered in previous works, and highlights its usage in the context of three experimental scenarios.

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“…Furthermore, MUDgee is used by [36] and [37], which proposes an IoT device classification framework, and by [38], in which the generated MUD profiles are translated into flow rules. Moreover, [39] devices. The same tool is used to generate the network profile of a smart doorbell in [40], which also identifies similar limitations of the standard to define more fine-grained aspects of the communication of IoT devices.…”

Section: A Mud Profiles Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Content may change prior to final publication. [33] (MUD Maker) [34] (MUDgee) [36] (MUDgee) [37] (MUDgee) [38] (MUDgee) [39] (MUDgee) [21] (MUD Maker) [40] (MUDgee) [41] (MUDgee) [20] (security testing results [55]) [44] (devices' changing behavior in smart buildings) [32] (MUD Maker) [19] (Medium-level Security Policy Language (MSPL) [45]) [47] (QoS parameters) [42] (MUDgee) [48] (human usage aspects) [49] (physical layer parameters and flow statistics) [52] (devices' fingerprinting data) [30] (MUD Maker) [42] (MUDgee) behavioral profiles for connected devices. These aspects are further discussed in Section V.…”

Section: A Mud Profiles Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining the Behavior of IoT Devices Through the MUD Standard: Review, Challenges, and Research Directions

et al. 2021

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With the strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the definition of IoT devices' intended behavior is key for an effective detection of potential cybersecurity attacks and threats in an increasingly connected environment. In 2019, the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) was standardized within the IETF as a data model and architecture for defining, obtaining and deploying MUD files, which describe the network behavioral profiles of IoT devices. While it has attracted a strong interest from academia, industry, and Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), MUD is not yet widely deployed in real-world scenarios. In this work, we analyze the current research landscape around this standard, and describe some of the main challenges to be considered in the coming years to foster its adoption and deployment. Based on the literature analysis and our own experience in this area, we further describe potential research directions exploiting the MUD standard to encourage the development of secure IoTenabled scenarios.

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Characterizing Smart Home IoT Traffic in the Wild

Cited by 46 publications

References 22 publications

BULWARK: A Framework to Store IoT Data in User Accounts

BULWARK: A Framework to Store IoT Data in User Accounts

SyntIoT: Privacy and security experimentation in consumer-oriented IoT ecosystems

Defining the Behavior of IoT Devices Through the MUD Standard: Review, Challenges, and Research Directions

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