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Prior work has developed numerous systems that test the security and safety of smart homes. For these systems to be applicable in practice, it is necessary to test them with realistic scenarios that represent the use of the smart home, i.e., home automation, in the wild. This demo paper presents the technical details and usage of Helion, a system that uses n-gram language modeling to learn the regularities in user-driven programs, i.e., routines developed for the smart home, and predicts natural scenarios of home automation, i.e., event sequences that reflect realistic home automation usage. We demonstrate the HelionHA platform, developed by integrating Helion with the popular Home Assistant smart home platform. HelionHA allows an end-to-end exploration of Helion’s scenarios by executing them as test cases with real and virtual smart home devices. 

Home automation platforms enable consumers to conveniently automate various physical aspects of their homes. However, the security flaws in the platforms or integrated third-party products can have serious security and safety implications for the user’s physical environment. This article describes our systematic security evaluation of two popular smart home platforms, Google’s Nest platform and Philips Hue, which implement home automation “routines” (i.e., trigger-action programs involving apps and devices) via manipulation of state variables in a centralized data store . Our semi-automated analysis examines, among other things, platform access control enforcement, the rigor of non-system enforcement procedures, and the potential for misuse of routines, and it leads to 11 key findings with serious security implications. We combine several of the vulnerabilities we find to demonstrate the first end-to-end instance of lateral privilege escalation in the smart home, wherein we remotely disable the Nest Security Camera via a compromised light switch app. Finally, we discuss potential defenses, and the impact of the continuous evolution of smart home platforms on the practicality of security analysis. Our findings draw attention to the unique security challenges of smart home platforms and highlight the importance of enforcing security by design. 

Home automation platforms provide a new level of convenience by enabling consumers to automate various aspects of physical objects in their homes. While the convenience is beneficial, security flaws in the platforms or integrated third-party products can have serious consequences for the integrity of a user's physical environment. In this paper we perform a systematic security evaluation of two popular smart home platforms, Google's Nest platform and Philips Hue, that implement home automation "routines" (i.e., trigger-action programs involving apps and devices) via manipulation of state variables in a centralized data store. Our semi-automated analysis examines, among other things, platform access control enforcement, the rigor of non-system enforcement procedures, and the potential for misuse of routines. This analysis results in ten key findings with serious security implications. For instance, we demonstrate the potential for the misuse of smart home routines in the Nest platform to perform a lateral privilege escalation, illustrate how Nest's product review system is ineffective at preventing multiple stages of this attack that it examines, and demonstrate how emerging platforms may fail to provide even bare-minimum security by allowing apps to arbitrarily add/remove other apps from the user's smart home. Our findings draw attention to the unique security challenges of platforms that execute routines via centralized data stores, and highlight the importance of enforcing security by design in emerging home automation platforms.