Project Urban Patrol: Building an Attack Resilient Smart Home Architecture

Internet of Things or IoT has started to alter consumers, enterprises and governments and is paving the way of urban development. From smart homes, to smart cars, from smart toasters to smart buildings and smart grids, IoT devices are becoming ubiquitous. Over the past years, the value of IoT devices being used in homes have immensely increased. As beneficial as IoT devices are they do create significant security challenges. Without security, any connected device can be hacked and using merely one unsecured device in the home network an attacker can easily sabotage certain operations and gain access to user's data thereby invading privacy. The goal of Project Urban is to mitigate attacks on a Smart Home network and thereby create a patrolling system for this epitome of urbanization. The proposed design consists of individual device proxies. The central hub collects application layer data of each IoT device from each device proxy in the network. The collected data is used as inputs to train the central hub for detecting intrusion in the smart home network. The architecture uses XGBoost to classify and detect anomalies and it also implements a role based access mechanism to validate authorization and access controls.