{"id":297797,"date":"2016-09-26T15:23:34","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T22:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=297797"},"modified":"2018-10-16T21:50:34","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T04:50:34","slug":"security-analysis-emerging-smart-home-applications","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/security-analysis-emerging-smart-home-applications\/","title":{"rendered":"Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;font-family: Calibri\">Recently, several competing smart home programming frameworks that support third party app development have emerged. These frameworks provide tangible bene\ufb01ts to users, but can also expose users to signi\ufb01cant security risks. This paper presents the \ufb01rst in-depth empirical security analysis of one such emerging smart home programming platform. We analyzed Samsung-owned SmartThings, which has the largest number of apps among currently available smart home platforms, and supports a broad range of devices including motion sensors, \ufb01re alarms, and door locks. SmartThings hosts the application runtime on a proprietary, closed-source cloud backend, making scrutiny challenging. We overcame the challenge with a static source code analysis of 499 SmartThings apps (called SmartApps) and 132 device handlers, and carefully crafted test cases that revealed many undocumented features of the platform. Our key \ufb01ndings are twofold. First, although SmartThings implements a privilege separation model, we discovered two intrinsic design \ufb02aws that lead to signi\ufb01cant overprivilege in SmartApps. Our analysis reveals that over 55% of SmartApps in the store are overprivileged due to the capabilities being too coarse-grained. Moreover, once installed, a SmartApp is granted full access to a device even if it speci\ufb01es needing only limited access to the device. Second, the SmartThings event subsystem, which devices use to communicate asynchronously with SmartApps via events, does not suf\ufb01ciently protect events that carry sensitive information such as lock codes. We exploited framework design \ufb02aws to construct four proof-of-concept attacks that: (1) secretly planted door lock codes; (2) stole existing door lock codes; (3) disabled vacation mode of the home; and (4) induced a fake \ufb01re alarm. We conclude the paper with security lessons for the design of emerging smart home programming frameworks.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, several competing smart home programming frameworks that support third party app development have emerged. These frameworks provide tangible bene\ufb01ts to users, but can also expose users to signi\ufb01cant security risks. This paper presents the \ufb01rst in-depth empirical security analysis of one such emerging smart home programming platform. We analyzed Samsung-owned SmartThings, which has the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13547],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-297797","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"IEEE","msr_edition":"37th IEEE Symposium on Security and 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