Securing Smart Home Edge Devices against Compromised Cloud Servers
This addresses security vulnerabilities in smart home systems for users and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing IoT security work by focusing on server-side protection.
The paper tackles the problem of securing smart home IoT systems against compromised cloud servers by introducing FIDELIUS, a runtime system that reduces data communication time by over 50% and doubles battery life compared to a commercial framework, while also achieving 4-7X faster access times with 25-43X less data transfer than an alternative ORAM-based implementation.
Smart home IoT systems often rely on cloud-based servers for communication between components. Although there exists a body of work on IoT security, most of it focuses on securing clients (i.e., IoT devices). However, cloud servers can also be compromised. Existing approaches do not typically protect smart home systems against compromised cloud servers. This paper presents FIDELIUS: a runtime system for secure cloud-based storage and communication even in the presence of compromised servers. FIDELIUS's design is tailored for smart home systems that have intermittent Internet access. In particular, it supports local control of smart home devices in the event that communication with the cloud is lost, and provides a consistency model using transactions to mitigate inconsistencies that can arise due to network partitions. We have implemented FIDELIUS, developed a smart home benchmark that uses FIDELIUS, and measured FIDELIUS's performance and power consumption. Our experiments show that compared to the commercial Particle.io framework, FIDELIUS reduces more than 50% of the data communication time and increases battery life by 2X. Compared to PyORAM, an alternative (ORAM-based) oblivious storage implementation, FIDELIUS has 4-7X faster access times with 25-43X less data transferred.