On the privacy risks of compromised trigger-action platforms

Abstract

Trigger-action platforms empower users to interconnect various physical devices and online services with custom automation. While providing convenience, their centralized design raises privacy concerns for end users. Unlike prior work that consider privacy leakage to action services, we consider privacy leakage to compromised platforms. After investigating potential privacy exposure to a popular trigger-action platform, IFTTT, we identified three types of leakages: event data, trigger event presence, and device possession. We also found that 91% of the top 500 triggers on IFTTT potentially leak sensitive information to the platform, and 25% leak implicitly. To achieve the paradoxical goal of hiding the event data and presence while asking the platform to trigger corresponding actions when an event occurs, we propose Obfuscated Trigger-Action Platform (OTAP) and Anonymous Trigger-Action Platform (ATAP). ATAP additionally provides device set confidentiality at the cost of minor platform modification. Our schemes can preserve user privacy without sacrificing convenience, and are incrementally deployable in various use cases. Our work addresses a crucial missing piece in securing the trigger-action ecosystem, and can be integrated with solutions that ensure integrity against untrusted platforms or solutions that address untrusted vendor services and users.