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arXiv · 2311.13761

On the Feasibility of Reasoning about the Internal States of Blackbox IoT Devices Using Side-Channel Information

Wei Sun·Yuwei Xiao·Haojian Jin·Dinesh Bharadia
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Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are typically designed to function in a secure, closed environment, making it difficult for users to comprehend devices' behaviors. This paper shows that a user can leverage side-channel information to reason fine-grained internal states of black box IoT devices. The key enablers for our design are a multi-model sensing technique that fuses power consumption, network traffic, and radio emanations and an annotation interface that helps users form mental models of a black box IoT system. We built a prototype of our design and evaluated the prototype with open-source IoT devices and black-box commercial devices. Our experiments show a false positive rate of 1.44% for open-source IoT devices' state probing, and our participants take an average of 19.8 minutes to reason the internal states of black-box IoT devices.

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Wei Sun, Yuwei Xiao, Haojian Jin, Dinesh Bharadia. 2023-11-23. On the Feasibility of Reasoning about the Internal States of Blackbox IoT Devices Using Side-Channel Information. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13761

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