Cybersecurity of Smart Home Systems: Sensor Identity Protection

Smart home systems are designed as platforms for connecting sensors, home appliances, and devices to exchange data and, ultimately, to provide useful services to home residents. However, such systems are vulnerable to Cybersecurity attacks that can affect the reliability and integrity of the delivered services. Sensors, planted at smart homes or equipped with smart appliances, are highly exposed to identity theft. Intruders can recognize through the understanding of the exchanged data, their locations, or knowing their associated services. Such information might make the home resident vulnerable to life attacks. Therefore, protecting sensors identities in smart home systems is of high interest in this domain. This paper introduces a novel technique that protects sensors’ identity from being recognized through cordless communication environments. Our proposed approach utilizes a three-phase technique that controls a synchronized queue among connected sensors and keeps their identity hidden from outsiders. The proposed approach preserves the linearity of time that is required to manage the protection of the home network. To validate the performance of our proposed approach, we conducted experiments on four different smart homes datasets. Furthermore, we performed a sensitivity analysis to measure how our proposed approach is affected by different environmental variables. The results indicated that the proposed approach provides a significant performance in protecting sensors identities in smart home area networks. Furthermore, during the sensitivity analysis, we found that our proposed technique’s performance is highly affected by the threshold value that defines each sensor’s time interval.