Overcoming invasion of privacy in smart home environment with synthetic packet injection

Abstract

We live in an increasingly connected world where not only can we open our garage doors with sensors, but from a remote location we can also lock our doors, or turn off our lights. Such convenience and flexibility come with great concerns for privacy and security. In this paper, we study privacy of smart home devices in home residence settings and show how homeowner’s privacy could be compromised via simple network traffic analysis. We first measure normal traffic patterns generated on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) smart home devices, and identify possible privacy vulnerabilities. We designed a smart home hub-integrated solution to mitigate such risk by obscuring real network traffic with synthetic traffic. We suggest that the smart home industry consider incorporating this approach into their products to improve privacy in the smart home environment.