Rahul Chatterjee

*Please note: this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff.

Speaker:
Rahul Chatterjee
Assistant Professor in Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Talk Title:
Privacy and Safety Issues of Smart Home Devices

Abstract:
Smart home devices (a.k.a. IoT devices), like Internet-connected thermostats, door locks, and item trackers, are transforming our personal spaces, offering convenience and automation. While these innovations enhance our lives, they also pose potential privacy and safety concerns. In this talk, we'll dive deeper into these critical issues, exploring the privacy and safety risks posed by smart devices.

In the first part, I will talk about the privacy concerns posed by integrator services, such as Google Home, Apple HomeKit, IFTTT, and Zapier, which enable users to control smart home devices from different manufacturers and set up rules to interconnect them. These integrator services today have access to sensitive private data and the ability to control devices of all of their users. Thus, they are a ripe target for attack and a single point of failure in the IoT ecosystem should they be compromised. I will show how to minimize the privacy exposure to these services using novel data and metadata hiding techniques while maintaining their functionality and being compatible with the current IoT deployment model.

In the second part of the talk, I will focus on the safety concern with smart homes, especially in the intimate partner violence (IPV) contexts. We surveyed online forums, blog posts, and news articles and interviewed survivors of IPV and advocates who work with them to systematize the risk posed by smart home devices and how survivors cope with this new vector of abuse. We found that certain devices like hidden cameras and microphones are designed for surreptitious surveillance and easily available via large U.S. retailers like Amazon and Best Buy. Seemingly innocuous devices like smart thermostats and smart speakers are being used for spying and/or harassing the survivors. I will end with some open challenges for survivors today to combat smart home abuse.

Bio:
Rahul Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Rahul’s research focuses on improving user authentication systems, securing smart home communications, and mitigating violence mediated by digital technologies. Rahul’s research is supported by NIJ/OVC, NSF, and Facebook awards. His work has received the Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2016 and honorable mention for the Best Paper Award in ACM CSCW 2019. His research work has been covered by several news outlets, including New York Times, Global News, and MIT Tech review. Rahul completed his Ph.D. from Cornell and received his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur.

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