Future Homes: Smart with Privacy Concerns

By Ali Nassiri, Adrian David Cheok

Smart home and its promising applications for comforting human’s life, can be a serious vulnerability for users’ privacy. Concerns about privacy raise due to increasing number of smart devices that can collect more data and offer more services while increasing the potential of privacy violation. Most of smart devices communicate to each other through wireless networks, wireless signals are achievable for unauthorized signal sniffers. However, cryptographic techniques may be able to protect content of messages, still contextual data is the weak point.

Side channel attacks make adversaries able to collect private data related to identity, location and temporal data. Attackers are able to perform a passive attack and analysis intercepted signals and find patterns to identify smart devices. As a consequence, in-home activities will be revealed to the attacker.

In this research, we aim to propose an optimized privacy protection model based on probability theory to increase the obfuscation level of wireless communication and reduce the correctness rate of the attack algorithm to provide higher privacy in an energy efficient way.

Proposed algorithm will work as a decision-making mechanism for each smart devices to consider privacy preservation requirements.