SaTC: CORE: Medium: Sentinel: Constructing Secure Smart Home IoT Systems via Managed Communications

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Smart home devices such as thermostats, baby monitors, security sensors, and power meters offer significant benefits for the home, such as reduced energy and water consumption, increased convenience, and remote monitoring.  But they also bring significant new security challenges as they communicate with one another and with cloud-based systems through the Internet. Configuring the diverse security settings for these smart home devices is very challenging for home users and the device manufacturers often do not have the resources to invest in securing their smart home products. The Sentinel project is developing tools and techniques to improve security for smart home systems.   The Sentinel project team is developing techniques to isolate smart home devices from attackers, while still implementing the desired functionality. The approach leverages two key insights: (1) Smart home devices do not need to run general purpose software, and (2) Smart home devices rely heavily on communication patterns that can be pre-defined. The Sentinel software development framework provides application programming language support for defining and enforcing communication patterns, as well as static analysis tools to check security properties. The system uses router-based runtime protection to secure local communications among smart home devices and cryptographic techniques for securing the communication between devices and the cloud.