Privacy in the Smart Household: Towards a Risk Assessment Model for Domestic IoT

Abstract

There has been an overwhelming increase of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the market in recent years, and the number is rapidly growing. The applications for IoT are nearly endless, and the emergence of house assistants made IoT available for the masses and everyday consumers. With this exponential growth come challenges, and one of the most pressing is perhaps the risk of privacy breach. These small IoT devices rarely have any real computing power, and therefore are rarely equipped with antivirus software or other safeguards. Most IoT devices rely on the same communication protocols that they have always used, and with the evolution of the internet of things, and the internet in general, there are revealed new vulnerabilities everyday due to little or no effort to update or patch the existing software in these devices. Even the companies that publish their device specifications and information, leave it almost impossible for the user to understand, or even find said information. With the Risk Assessment model, this research aims to give the users of smart devices a tool to determine the potential risks that are involved with the internet of things and the many different smart devices.