Traversing the quagmire that is privacy in your smart home

Chuhan Gao, Varun Chandrasekaran, Kassem Fawaz, Suman Banerjee

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Voice has become an increasingly popular User Interaction (UI) channel, with voice-activated devices becoming regular fixtures in our homes. The popularity of voice-based assistants (VAs), however, have brought along significant privacy and security threats to their users. Recent revelations have indicated that some VAs record user's private conversations continuously and innocuously. With the VAs being connected to the Internet, they can leak the recorded content without the user's authorization. Moreover, these devices often do not pack authentication mechanisms to check if the voice commands are issued by authorized users. To address both shortcomings, we propose a framework to impose a security and privacy perimeter around the user's VA. Our proposed framework continuously jams the VA to prevent it from innocuously recording the user's speech, unless the user issues a voice command. To prevent unauthorized voice commands, our framework provides a scheme similar to two-factor authentication to only grant access when the authorized user is in its vicinity. Our proposed framework achieves both objectives through a combination of several techniques to (a) continuously jam one (or many) VA's microphones in a manner inaudible to the user, and (b) provide only authenticated users easy access to VAs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIoT S and P 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Workshop on IoT Security and Privacy, Part of SIGCOMM 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages22-28
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359054
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 7 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on the Internet-of-Things Security and Privacy, IoT S and P 2018 - Budapest, Hungary
Duration: Aug 20 2018 → …

Publication series

NameIoT S and P 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Workshop on IoT Security and Privacy, Part of SIGCOMM 2018

Conference

Conference2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on the Internet-of-Things Security and Privacy, IoT S and P 2018
Country/TerritoryHungary
CityBudapest
Period8/20/18 → …

Keywords

  • Authentication
  • Privacy
  • Smart home
  • Ultrasound jamming
  • Voice assistant

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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