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Systematically Ensuring the Confidence of Real-Time Home Automation IoT Systems

Authors:

Lei Bu,

Wen Xiong,

Chieh-Jan Mike Liang,

Shi Han,

Dongmei Zhang,

Shan Lin,

Xuandong LiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, Volume 2, Issue 3

Article No.: 22, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3185501

Published: 13 June 2018 Publication History

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Abstract

Recent advances and industry standards in Internet of Things (IoT) have accelerated the real-world adoption of connected devices. To manage this hybrid system of digital real-time devices and analog environments, the industry has pushed several popular home automation IoT (HA-IoT) frameworks, such as If-This-Then-That (IFTTT), Apple HomeKit, and Google Brillo. Typically, users author device interactions by specifying the triggering sensor event and the triggered device command. In this seemingly simple software system, two dominant factors govern the system confidence properties with respect to the physical world. First, IoT users are largely nonexperts who lack the comprehensive consideration regarding potential impact and joint effect with existing rules. Second, while the increasing complexity of IoT devices enables fine-grained control (e.g., heater temperature) of continuous real-time environments, even two simply connected devices can have a huge state space to explore. In fact, bugs that wrongfully control devices and home appliances can have ramifications on system correctness and even user physical safety. It is crucial to help users to make sure the system they created meets their expectation. In this article we introduce how techniques from hybrid automata can be practically applied to assist nonexpert IoT users in the confidence checking of such hybrid HA-IoT systems. We propose an automated framework for end-to-end programming assistance. We build and check the Linear Hybrid Automata (LHA) model of the system automatically. We also present a quantifier elimination-based method to analyze the counterexample found and synthesize fix suggestions. We implemented a platform, MenShen, based on this framework and proposed techniques. We conducted sets of real HA-IoT case studies with up to 46 devices and 65 rules. Empirical results show that MenShen can find violations and generate rule fix suggestions in only 10 seconds.

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Cited By

View all

Al-Wahah MAl-Hossenat A(2024)Safety Assurance in IoT-Based Smart HomesEdge Computing Architecture - Architecture and Applications for Smart Cities10.5772/intechopen.1005492Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1005492
Chen LWang CChen CHuang CChen XZhang M(2024)TapChecker: A Lightweight SMT-Based Conflict Analysis for Trigger-Action ProgrammingIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.337455611:12(21411-21426)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3374556
Li KWang HZhou MZhu HSun L(2024)Cascading Threat Analysis of IoT Devices in Trigger-Action PlatformsIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2023.333527911:7(12240-12251)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2023.3335279
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Index Terms

Systematically Ensuring the Confidence of Real-Time Home Automation IoT Systems
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods
        Model checking

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Reviews

Reviewer: Dominik Strzalka

The quick expansion of computing technology in many areas leads to different new paradigms; among them is the paradigm of cyber-physical systems (CPS) with commonly acquired sensor data that can be processed in real time. One of the manifestations of this paradigm is the omnipresence and the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in home automation (HA-IoT) services, which industry also supports via simple, intuitive event-triggered rules called if-this-then-that (IFTTT) rules. They are so common that thousands of users shared more than 340,000 rules in the format of "if A , then B ," where A is a sensor triggering event and B is a device command. However, it should also be noted that the rules can be very simple, but the final user of an IFTTT-style HA-IoT system need not necessarily be aware of their behavior over time. The paper shows "an end-to-end programming assistance system to automate the modeling, checking, and fixing of HA-IoT systems" via "hybrid automata model checking of real-time HA-IoT system[s]"; counterexample-guided fix suggestions; and "system implementation and real case evaluation." The authors support their proposal using two important reasons: (i) "lack of automatic HA-IoT confidence verification," and (ii) "lack of debugging feedback for nonexpert IoT users." Following a simple mathematical background in section 2, the authors propose an architecture framework in section 3. It consists of three parts: (1) linear hybrid automata (LHA) automatic modeling, (2) reachability analysis of the LHA model, and (3) counterexample-guided fix suggestion synthesis. Each proposed part is described in sections 4 and 5. Finally, the supporting system, called MenShen, is proposed. Its work and important features are described in section 6, together with the results of some experiments. The result is an interesting solution that allows for automated end-to-end programming. It may be especially helpful for nonexpert IoT users in modeling and managing HA-IoT systems.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems

ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems Volume 2, Issue 3

Special Issue on the Internet of Things: Part 2

July 2018

181 pages

ISSN:2378-962X

EISSN:2378-9638

DOI:10.1145/3232714

Editor:
Tei-Wei Kuo
National Taiwan University, and Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

Publication History

Published: 13 June 2018

Accepted: 01 January 2018

Revised: 01 June 2017

Received: 01 July 2016

Published in TCPS Volume 2, Issue 3

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Al-Wahah MAl-Hossenat A(2024)Safety Assurance in IoT-Based Smart HomesEdge Computing Architecture - Architecture and Applications for Smart Cities10.5772/intechopen.1005492Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1005492
Chen LWang CChen CHuang CChen XZhang M(2024)TapChecker: A Lightweight SMT-Based Conflict Analysis for Trigger-Action ProgrammingIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.337455611:12(21411-21426)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3374556
Li KWang HZhou MZhu HSun L(2024)Cascading Threat Analysis of IoT Devices in Trigger-Action PlatformsIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2023.333527911:7(12240-12251)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2023.3335279
Abuserrieh LAlalfi M(2024)A Survey on Verification of Security and Safety in IoT SystemsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341307112(138627-138645)Online publication date: 2024
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Bu LZhang QLi SDai JBai GChen KLi XJust RFraser G(2023)Security Checking of Trigger-Action-Programming Smart Home IntegrationsProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3597926.3598084(639-651)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2023
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Ban XDing MLiu SChen CZhang J(2022)A Survey on IoT Vulnerability DiscoveryNetwork and System Security10.1007/978-3-031-23020-2_15(267-282)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2022
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Recommendations

Design and implementation of a low-cost home automation and monitoring IoT system using message que telemetry transport protocol: south africa context

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