Survey on smart homes: Vulnerabilities, risks, and countermeasures

Abstract

Over the last few years, the explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the way we live and interact with each other as well as with various types of systems and devices which form part of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure. IoT is having a significant impact on various application domains including healthcare, smart home, transportation, energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and many others. We focus on the smart home environment which has attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry recently. The smart home provides a lot of convenience to home users but it also opens up various risks that threaten both the security and privacy of the users. In contrast to previous works on smart home security and privacy, we present an overview of smart homes from both academic and industry perspectives. Next we discuss the security requirements, challenges and threats associated with smart homes. Finally, we discuss countermeasures that can be deployed to mitigate the identified threats.