Cross-App Interference Threats in Smart Homes: Categorization, Detection and Handling Haotian Chi∗, Qiang Zengy, Xiaojiang Du∗, Jiaping Yu∗ ∗Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA yDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA Email: fhtchi, dux,
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract—A number of Internet of Things (IoTs) platforms a smart door lock via an IoT app to break into homes, which have emerged to enable various IoT apps developed by third- is impossible in non-appified IoT systems. party developers to automate smart homes. Prior research mostly Fernandes et al. [22] discover design flaws such as the concerns the overprivilege problem in the permission model. Our work, however, reveals that even IoT apps that follow overprivilege problem in Samsung’s SmartThings, one of the the principle of least privilege, when they interplay, can cause most mature smart home platforms; they demonstrate that unique types of threats, named Cross-App Interference (CAI) malicious apps can be constructed to expose smart homes to threats. We describe and categorize the new threats, showing severe attacks that exploit the overprivilege problem. Thus, that unexpected automation, security and privacy issues may be some systems are proposed to handle the problem. ContexIoT caused by such threats, which cannot be handled by existing IoT security mechanisms. To address this problem, we present [29] proposes a context-based permission system to involve HOMEGUARD, a system for appified IoT platforms to detect users into making decisions on whether a security-critical and cope with CAI threats.