My Smart Home is Under Attack

Abstract

Home Automation is becoming more and more common in everyday life. In order to permit a remote control of domestic devices a bridge between the Internet network and the Home Network is necessary. This function is commonly operated by the Smart Home gateway which thus results a critical point for the security of the network. Recently several general purpose devices exist that are capable of connecting both to the Home Network and the Internet network, leading to have additional, dynamic and unpredictable, bridges between the two networks. This possibility makes such devices additional attack vectors for the Smart Home. In this work we show the risks resulting from such devices. By using an emulated scenario we also demonstrate the implementation of a real attack exploiting a general purpose device connected to both the Internet and the Home Network. Preliminary experimental results are presented confirming the success of our attack.