Title
IoT Inspector: Crowdsourcing Labeled Network Traffic from Smart Home Devices at Scale
Abstract
The proliferation of smart home devices has created new opportunities for empirical research in ubiquitous computing, ranging from security and privacy to personal health. Yet, data from smart home deployments are hard to come by, and existing empirical studies of smart home devices typically involve only a small number of devices in lab settings. To contribute to data-driven smart home research, we crowdsource the largest known dataset of labeled network traffic from smart home devices from within real-world home networks. To do so, we developed and released IoT Inspector, an open-source tool that allows users to observe the traffic from smart home devices on their own home networks. Between April 10, 2019 and January 21, 2020, 5,404 users have installed IoT Inspector, allowing us to collect labeled network traffic from 54,094 smart home devices. At the time of publication, IoT Inspector is still gaining users and collecting data from more devices. We demonstrate how this data enables new research into smart homes through two case studies focused on security and privacy. First, we find that many device vendors, including Amazon and Google, use outdated TLS versions and send unencrypted traffic, sometimes to advertising and tracking services. Second, we discover that smart TVs from at least 10 vendors communicated with advertising and tracking services. Finally, we find widespread cross-border communications, sometimes unencrypted, between devices and Internet services that are located in countries with potentially poor privacy practices. To facilitate future reproducible research in smart homes, we will release the IoT Inspector data to the public.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3397333
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Internet-of-Things,network measurement,privacy,security,smart home
Journal
4
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
2474-9567
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
18
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Danny Yuxing Huang11108.15
Noah J. Apthorpe2898.53
Frank Haizhon Li347125.23
Gunes Acar428715.23
Nick Feamster54736390.57