IoTBystander: A Non-Intrusive Dual-Channel-Based Smart Home Security Monitoring Framework
Haotian Chi, Qi Ma, Yuwei Wang, Jing Yang, Haijun Geng · Applied Sciences · 2025
The increasing prevalence of IoT technology in smart homes has significantly enhanced convenience but also introduced new security and safety challenges. Traditional security solutions, reliant on sequences of IoT-generated event data (e.g., notifications of device status changes and sensor readings), are vulnerable to cyberattacks, such as message forgery and interception and delaying attacks, and fail to monitor non-smart devices. Moreover, fragmented smart home ecosystems require vendor cooperation or system modifications for comprehensive monitoring, limiting the practicality of the existing approaches. To address these issues, we propose IoTBystander, a non-intrusive dual-channel smart home security monitoring framework that utilizes two ubiquitous platform-agnostic signals, i.e., audio and network, to monitor user and device activities. We introduce a novel dual-channel aggregation mechanism that integrates insights from both channels and cross-verifies the integrity of monitoring results. This approach expands the monitoring scope to include non-smart devices and provides richer context for anomaly detection, failure diagnosis, and configuration debugging. Empirical evaluations on a real-world testbed with nine smart and eleven non-smart devices demonstrate the high accuracy of IoTBystander in event recognition: 92.86% for recognizing events of smart devices, 95.09% for non-smart devices, and 94.27% for all devices. A case study on five anomaly scenarios further shows significant improvements in anomaly detection performance by combining the strengths of both channels.