A Survey on IoT-Enabled Home Automation Systems: Attacks and Defenses

Abstract

With recent advances in communication technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures, home automation (HA) systems have emerged as a new promising paradigm that provides convenient smart-home services to users. However, there exist various security risks during the deployment and application of HA systems, which pose severe security threats to users. On the one hand, traditional IoT security threats (e.g., device intrusion, protocol vulnerabilities, and so on) are inherent to HA systems. On the other hand, as the core of HA systems, the Trigger-Action Programming (TAP) model organizes cloud platforms, local hubs, and smart devices through user-customized rules, but the complex interactions involved bring new challenges to the security of HA systems. These two kinds of security issues have attracted widespread attention from both academia and industry, and explorations on both attack and defense have been made. However, there is not yet a survey that provides a summary of the overall HA systems’ security research. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art literature on HA system security from aspects of attack and defense. We first give a brief introduction to the HA system architecture and present a general workflow of HA systems. Then, we review and classify the relevant attacks based on the HA architecture, with an explicit analysis of vulnerabilities exploited by these attacks. We further elaborate on the security requirements of HA systems and provide detailed descriptions and comparisons of existing defenses methods. Finally, we conclude with a thorough discussion of open issues for future research.