Typical Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home environments are composed of smart devices that are controlled and orchestrated by applications developed and run in the cloud. Correctness is important for these applications, since they control the home's physical security (i.e. door locks) and systems (i.e. HVAC). Unfortunately, many smart home applications and systems exhibit poor security characteristics and insufficient system support. Instead they force application developers to reason about a combination of complicated scenarios-asynchronous events and distributed devices. This paper demonstrates that existing cloud-based smart home platforms provide insufficient support for applications to correctly deal with concurrency and data consistency issues. These weaknesses expose platform vulnerabilities that affect system correctness and security (e.g. a smart lock erroneously unlocked). To address this, we present OKAPI, an application-level API that provides strict atomicity and event ordering. We evaluate our work using the Samsung SmartThings smart home devices, hub, and cloud infrastructure. In addition to identifying shortfalls of cloud-based smart home platforms, we propose design guidelines to make application developers oblivious of smart home platforms' consistency and concurrency intricacies.
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The Upcycled Home: Removing Barriers to Lightweight Modification of the Home's Everyday Objects
The Internet-of-things (IoT) embeds computing in everyday objects, but has largely focused on new devices while ignoring the home's many existing possessions. We present a field study with 10 American families to understand how these possessions could be included in the smart home through upcycling. We describe three patterns for how families collaborate around home responsibilities; we explore families' mental models of home that may be in tension with existing IoT systems; and we identify ways that families can more easily imagine a smart home that includes their existing possessions. These insights can help us design an upcycled approach to IoT that supports users in reconfiguring objects (and social roles as mediated by objects) in a way that is sensitive to what will be displaced, discarded, or made obsolete. Our findings inform the design of future lightweight systems for the upcycled home.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718651
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10191360
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376314
