Security and Privacy in Smart Homes
Dan Zhao, Qing Li, Qingsong Zou, Jingyu Xiao, Kaidong Wu, Ruoyu Li, Jianhui Lv, Yong Jiang, Keqin Li · 2025
The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem brings great convenience to our daily lives. However, it also introduces multiple forms of privacy and security risks into our surroundings. In this chapter, we first discuss the broader context of privacy and security within today’s IoT networks, especially in smart home scenarios. We discuss why safeguarding IoT networks from privacy and security risks is particularly crucial and why current IoT systems are especially vulnerable to these risks. Then, we elaborate on the privacy implications of IoT networks. We explain how fingerprinting techniques can penetrate encryption and extract sensitive information about devices and users. The latest countermeasures to protect IoT from fingerprinting attacks, i.e., traffic morphing, are also discussed. For the security aspect of IoT systems, we turn our attention to two key protective technologies: trigger-action platform safety measures and network intrusion detection systems. We also briefly explain how the latest user behavior modeling techniques can be utilized for identifying abnormal behaviors, which adds an extra layer of protection to smart homes. Last, we discuss the future challenges confronting IoT and how researchers and vendors should work together to gear up IoT products against these new challenges.