Program Analysis of Commodity IoT Applications for Security and Privacy: Challenges and Opportunities

Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) have enabled myriad domains such as smart homes, personal monitoring devices, and enhanced manufacturing. IoT is now pervasive---new applications are being used in nearly every conceivable environment, which leads to the adoption of device-based interaction and automation. However, IoT has also raised issues about the security and privacy of these digitally augmented spaces. Program analysis is crucial in identifying those issues, yet the application and scope of program analysis in IoT remains largely unexplored by the technical community. In this paper, we study privacy and security issues in IoT that require program-analysis techniques with an emphasis on identified attacks against these systems and defenses implemented so far. Based on a study of five IoT programming platforms, we identify the key insights that result from research efforts in both the program analysis and security communities and relate the efficacy of program-analysis techniques to security and privacy issues. We conclude by studying recent IoT analysis systems and exploring their implementations. Through these explorations, we highlight key challenges and opportunities in calibrating for the environments in which IoT systems will be used.Comment: syntax and grammar error are fixed, and IoT platforms are updated to match with the submissio

Discovering Physical Interaction Vulnerabilities in IoT Deployments

Internet of Things (IoT) applications drive the behavior of IoT deployments according to installed sensors and actuators. It has recently been shown that IoT deployments are vulnerable to physical interactions, caused by design flaws or malicious intent, that can have severe physical consequences. Yet, extant approaches to securing IoT do not translate the app source code into its physical behavior to evaluate physical interactions. Thus, IoT consumers and markets do not possess the capability to assess the safety and security risks these interactions present. In this paper, we introduce the IoTSeer security service for IoT deployments, which uncovers undesired states caused by physical interactions. IoTSeer operates in four phases (1) translation of each actuation command and sensor event in an app source code into a hybrid I/O automaton that defines an app's physical behavior, (2) combining apps in a novel composite automaton that represents the joint physical behavior of interacting apps, (3) applying grid-based testing and falsification to validate whether an IoT deployment conforms to desired physical interaction policies, and (4) identification of the root cause of policy violations and proposing patches that guide users to prevent them. We use IoTSeer in an actual house with 13 actuators and six sensors with 37 apps and demonstrate its effectiveness and performance