A New Approach to Security Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Home Systems

Abstract

ZigBee networks, with their characteristics of high availability, low power consumption and cost-effective devices, are perfectly appropriate to construct Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Also, the natures of WSN listed above bring significant benefits over traditional communication networks used in smart home systems. A smart home system is meant to improve the quality of life through offering various automated, interactive and comfortable services, such as sensing and communicating the family member's health information with their doctors, or remotely controlling the appliances via cellular phones, emails etc. These critical services make the security of personal privacy and the authority of control commands vital issues in Smart Home environments. In this paper, we analyze the security challenges in WSNs and in smart home Systems. To thoroughly detect, defense and foresee the vulnerabilities existing in smart home networks, we proposed a security evaluation technique based on attack graph generation. We discuss the distinction between the attack graphs deployed in traditional networks and in smart home networks. Furthermore, we apply this technique into an experiment, and the results prove its practicality.