Smart Homes App Vulnerabilities, Threats, and Solutions: A Systematic Literature Review

The smart home is one of the most significant applications of Internet of Things (IoT). Smart home is basically the combination of different components like devices, hub, cloud, and smart apps. These components may often be vulnerable, and most likely to be exploited by attackers. Being the main link among all the components to establish communication, the compromised smart apps are the most threatening to smart home security. The existing surveys covers vulnerabilities and issues of smart homes and its components in various perspectives. Still, there is a gap to understand and organize the smart apps, security issues and their impact on smart homes and its stakeholders. The paper presents a systematic literature review on the smart apps related vulnerabilities, their possible threats and current state of the art of the available security mechanisms. In our survey we observed that currently research focuses on rules interaction and access control issue. The conclusive findings reveal the fact that available security mechanisms are not widely applicable and incur overheads to developers and users. The critical review of pertinent literature shows that these mechanisms are not enough to address the issues effectively. Therefore, a generalized and robust solution is essentially required to tackle the issues at their origin. We summarized the insights of our SLR, highlighting current scenario and future directions of research in this domain.