@inproceedings{17eb1d97c515418c99e69a6a4eba9c36,
title = "Privacy Leakage in Smart Homes and Its Mitigation: IFTTT as a Case Study",
abstract = "The combination of an appified smart home platform and third-party apps have enabled developers to contribute their novel ideas to bring more convenience to their users. However, this also brings the potential of privacy leakage. If a third-party app is permitted to monitor a user day and night, then it will learn the behavior pattern of this user before long. In this paper, we exploited how IFTTT monitors the daily life of a user in several ways that are hardly noticeable. We propose the 'Specific-fuzzification' to protect the privacy of a user in two steps: filter the unnecessary events to the IFTTT, then fuzz the value of the events that must be uploaded. We evaluated the 'Specific-fuzzification' on event records of seven users, the result showed comparing the original IFTTT, the modified IFTTT patched with 'Specific-fuzzification' only gained rare events and thus could no longer recognize any behavior patterns of a user.",
keywords = "IFTTT, SmartThings, privacy leakage, smart home",
author = "Rixin Xu and Qiang Zeng and Liehuang Zhu and Haotian Chi and Xiaojiang Du",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 IEEE.; 37th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference, IPCCC 2018 ; Conference date: 17-11-2018 Through 19-11-2018",
year = "2018",
month = jul,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1109/PCCC.2018.8711216",
language = "English",
series = "2018 IEEE 37th International Performance Computing and Communications Conference, IPCCC 2018",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
booktitle = "2018 IEEE 37th International Performance Computing and Communications Conference, IPCCC 2018",
address = "United States",
}