Friendly Fire: Cross-App Interactions in IoT Platforms
Musard Balliu, Massimo Merro, Michele Pasqua · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2020
IoT platforms enable users to connect various smart devices and online services viareactive apps running on the cloud. These apps, often developed by third-parties, performsimple computations on data triggered by external information sources and actuate theresults of computation on external information sinks. Recent research shows that unin-tended or malicious interactions between the dierent (even benign) apps of a user cancause severe security and safety risks. These works leverage program analysis techniquesto build tools for unveiling unexpected interference across apps for specic use cases.We propose a calculus that models the behavioral semantics of a system of apps ex-ecuting concurrently, and use it to dene desirable semantic policies in the security andsafety context of IoT apps. To demonstrate the usefulness of our framework, we denestatic mechanisms for enforcing cross-app security and safety, and prove them sound withrespect to our semantic conditions. Finally, we leverage real-world apps to validate thepractical benets of our policy framework.