A user level security framework for IoT in the smart home

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications are growing in popularity for smart home use cases. Although experts have reported on the importance of implementing security measures in smart home devices for several years, studies reveal that most devices released on the market have multiple security vulnerabilities and, in many cases, no implemented security mechanisms. These vulnerabilities of smart home networks are mostly attributed to users’ ignorance of security. Many users are unaware and lack the technical skills or knowledge about how their devices operate in their smart home environment. Existing research has raised the fact that users should be involved in mitigating security issues and protecting their own smart home devices. This research introduces a design that helps with user involvement and helps users protect their devices using simple configurations that can alert users of intrusions, thus helping to bring user awareness of their own smart home environment. These configurations create device interaction rules that are added to an existing network intrusion detection system (NIDS) in the smart home network. The research further discusses the generation of rules through user configuration that can detect intrusions. The design can be implemented in any internal smart home network irrespective of the number of users or device profiles within the home environment. Another advantage to such rule generation for smart home network use is that every smart home environment may not have the same rules generated through user configurations, as the rules are totally dependent on the user configurations. In addition to this, an existing attack signature is also introduced to detect specific attacks. These rules generate alarms that alert the user if unwanted interaction takes place between their devices or from an external network, in this way making users aware of the security breaches in their smart home network.