Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1809.05556

Playing With Danger: A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Threats to Smart Toys

Sharon Shasha·Moustafa Mahmoud·Mohammad Mannan·Amr Youssef
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Smart toys have captured an increasing share of the toy market, and are growing ubiquitous in households with children. Smart toys are a subset of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, containing sensors, actuators, and/or artificial intelligence capabilities. They frequently have internet connectivity, directly or indirectly through companion apps, and collect information about their users and environments. Recent studies have found security flaws in many smart toys that have led to serious privacy leaks, or allowed tracking a child's physical location. Some well-publicized discoveries of this nature have prompted actions from governments around the world to ban some of these toys. Compared to other IoT devices, smart toys pose unique risks because of their easily-vulnerable user base, and our work is intended to define these risks and assess a subset of toys against them. We provide a classification of threats specific to smart toys in order to unite and complement existing adhoc analyses, and help comprehensive evaluation of other smart toys. Our threat classification framework addresses the potential security and privacy flaws that can lead to leakage of private information or allow an adversary to control the toy to lure, harm, or distress a child. Using this framework, we perform a thorough experimental analysis of eleven smart toys and their companion apps. Our systematic analysis has uncovered that several current toys still expose children to multiple threats for attackers with physical, nearby, or remote access to the toy.

Explore related subjects

cs.CR

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Sharon Shasha, Moustafa Mahmoud, Mohammad Mannan, Amr Youssef. 2018-10-25. Playing With Danger: A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Threats to Smart Toys. https://doi.org/10.1109/jiot.2018.2877749

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Membership Inference Attacks on NLP Text Classifiers: A Baseline Study on SST-2

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) try to determine whether a specific record was used to train a model, a privacy risk that matters in natural language processing (NLP), where training data can contain sensitive user text. This paper presents a controlled benchmark of membership inference vulnerability for text classification on the GLUE SST-2 sentiment dataset. A TF-IDF + Logistic Regression pipeline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT classifier are compared under a loss-threshold MIA, with utility measured by development accuracy and macro F1. DistilBERT reached 0.9466 accuracy and 0.9460 macro F1 against 0.8756 and 0.8727 for Logistic Regression, yet both models leaked membership signal (Attack AUC 0.5615 and 0.5800, respectively). Two mitigations were tested. Stronger regularization reduced leakage for Logistic Regression at a visible utility cost, whereas fine-tuning DistilBERT for 2 epochs instead of 3 reduced leakage with negligible accuracy loss. Lightweight training adjustments can improve the privacy-utility trade-off without complex defenses.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Data Poisoning Attacks in Supervised Learning

Data poisoning corrupts training data to degrade a model or to plant attacker-controlled behavior. This study evaluates two representative training-time attacks, label flipping and backdoor poisoning, on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST with three baseline classifiers: Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, and Random Forest. Clean training is compared with poisoning rates of 5%, 10%, and 20% using clean-test accuracy, macro-precision, macro-recall, macro-F1, and, for backdoors, attack success rate. Label flipping caused clear degradation, largest for Logistic Regression and Linear SVM, while Random Forest stayed comparatively stable. Backdoor poisoning reached attack success rates from 0.9667 to 1.0000 on both datasets and all three models while often keeping clean-test performance near baseline. The results separate indiscriminate poisoning, which shows up in standard metrics, from targeted backdoor poisoning, which stays comparatively stealthy while embedding highly effective malicious behavior, and they support security-oriented evaluation beyond conventional clean-test metrics.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

DeFiFusion: Combining Transaction Events with Smart Contracts to Detect Price Manipulation Attacks

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has emerged as a rapidly growing blockchain-based financial service, where market transaction dynamics and underlying smart contract logic are intricately intertwined. This autonomous interplay, while eliminating centralized intermediaries, significantly expands the vulnerability surface of DeFi protocols to Price Manipulation Attacks (PMAs), which have already inflicted catastrophic financial losses. Despite their gravity, existing detection paradigms suffer from fundamental limitations. Transaction-centric methods lack awareness of contract execution semantics, making them prone to false positives under legitimate market volatility, while static contract analyses ignore real transaction behaviors and frequently report vulnerabilities that are infeasible to exploit in practice. We present DeFiFusion, a dual-modal PMA detection framework that closes this gap by jointly modeling transaction events and smart contract semantics within a unified pipeline. Our core insight is that PMA maliciousness emerges only from the interaction between transaction behaviors and the contract logic they exploit; neither signal suffices in isolation. Accordingly, we derive price-manipulation-aware event encoding for extracting fine-grained temporal and economic features tailored to manipulation patterns. We further introduce LLM-based contract semantic extraction to supply the execution-logic context that prior behavioral methods lack. To fuse these modalities, we propose a Dual-Modal Projection-Fusion Transformer with T5-style relative positional encoding, capturing the cyclic multi-stage execution structures that distinguish PMAs from benign market activity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeFiFusion consistently achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, effectively recalling 222 of the 225 PMA cases while maintaining a precision of 96.10%.

cs.CR↗