Title:  Security Evaluation of Smart Home Technology

Committee: 

Dr. Antonakakis, Advisor

Dr. Keromytis, Co-Advisor   

Dr. Blough, Chair

Dr. Ahamad

Dr. Monrose

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to present a comprehensive and systematic security evaluation of smart-home IoT ecosystem based on a novel framework. The framework segments a smart-home IoT deployment into four components evaluate their security, which includes the device services, cloud services, companion mobile applications, and network protocols. The work hypothesizes that a systematic security analysis of smart-home IoT devices can identify common security flaws that affect the whole ecosystem and, if fixed, can improve the overall security of the smart-home IoT space. To provide this comprehensive analysis, the work will conduct a longitudinal security evaluation of smart-home IoT devices to investigate the evolution of device, cloud, and network security.  Additionally, we study the IoT threat landscape to understand how malware targets smart-home IoT ecosystem and what class of security flaws should be prioritized for patching.