Abstract

A smart home involves a variety of entities, such as IoT devices, automation applications, humans, voice assistants, and companion apps. These entities interact in the same physical environment, which can yield undesirable and even hazardous results, called IoT interaction threats. Existing work on interaction threats is limited to considering automation apps, ignoring other IoT control channels, such as voice commands, companion apps, and physical operations. Second, it becomes increasingly common that a smart home utilizes multiple IoT platforms, each of which has a partial view of device states and may issue conflicting commands. Third, compared to detecting interaction threats, their handling is much less studied. Prior work uses generic handling policies, which are unlikely to fit all homes. We present IoT-Mediator, which provides accurate threat detection and threat-tailored handling in multiplatform multi-control-channel homes. Our evaluation in two real-world homes demonstrates that IoT-Mediator significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-artwork. This work has been published at one of the top four security conferences - USENIX Security 2023.

Reference

H. Chi, Q. Zeng, X. Du, "Detecting and Handling IoT Interaction Threats in Multi-Platform Multi-Control-Channel Smart Homes”, USENIX Security 2023, August. 2023, Anaheim, CA.

Bio

Dr. James Xiaojiang Du is the Anson Wood Burchard Endowed-Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, USA. He was a tenured professor at Temple University between August 2009 and August 2021. Dr. Du received his B.E. and M.E., from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996, and 1998 respectively. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2002 and 2003, respectively. His research interests are security, wireless networks, and systems. He has authored over 500 journal and conference papers in these areas, including the top security conferences such as IEEE Security & Privacy (S&P / Oakland), USENIX Security, and NDSS. 

Dr. Du has been awarded more than 8 million US dollars research grants from the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), US National Security Agency (NSA), US Army Research Office, US Air Force Research Lab, the State of Pennsylvania, and Amazon. He won the best paper award at IEEE ICC 2020, IEEE GLOBECOM 2014 and the best poster runner-up award at the ACM MobiHoc 2014. He serves on the editorial boards of three IEEE journals. He was the chair of multiple IEEE/ACM conferences, including General Co-Chair of IEEE/ACM IWQoS 2023, General Co-Chair of EAI SecureComm 2023, TPC Chair of IEEE CloudNet 2023, and Lead Chair of the  Communication and Information Systems Security Symposium of IEEE Globecom 2023. 

Dr. Du is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer 2023-2024. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, and an ACM Life Member.

According to Google Scholar, Dr. Du’s total number of citations is over 27,000, and his h-index is 81 (as of April 2024).

Bio

Dr. Richard Li is Chair Professor of Network Technologies, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. Prior to joining Southeast University in April 2024, Richard worked with Futurewei Technologies, aka Huawei R&D USA, from 2007 to 2024 as Chief Scientist, SVP, and Head of Network Technologies Lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA. Before that, Richard worked with Cisco and Ericsson on their networking products, technologies, solutions and network operating systems.

Richard also served as the Chairman of the ITU-T FG Network 2030 from 2018 to 2020, the Vice Chairman of the Europe ETSI ISG Next-Generation Protocols from 2016 to 2019, and Chairs of steering committees and technical program committees of some academic and industrial conferences. He was a recipient of the 2023 IEEE MMTC Outstanding Researcher Award, 2023 MMTC Best Conference Paper Award, and 6 other Best Paper Awards in international conferences. 

Richard was a keynote speaker in IEEE Globecom, Infocom, Healthcom, HPSR, NetSoft, UNet, CNSM, and a frequent speaker in 6G-related conferences, among others. During his career, Richard spearheaded network technology innovation and development in Packet-Switched Networks, Routing and MPLS, Mobile Backhaul Networks, Metro and Core Networks, Data Center, Cloud and Virtualization with 65 US-granted patents and 100+ publications. He serves on the advisory board for IEEE IoT Journal, as a technical editor for IEEE Network Magazine, and guest editors for special issues of some journals. His current interests include next-generation network architectures, protocols, algorithms, and systems in the support of emerging and forward-looking applications and industry verticals, especially in the context of 5G/6G and Network 2030.