Anomaly Detection Models for Smart Home Security

Recent years have seen significant growth in the adoption of smart homes devices. These devices provide convenience, security, and energy efficiency to users. For example, smart security cameras can detect unauthorized movements, and smoke sensors can detect potential fire accidents. However, many recent examples have shown that they open up a new cyber threat surface. There have been several recent examples of smart devices being hacked for privacy violations and also misused so as to perform DDoS attacks. In this paper, we explore the application of big data and machine learning to identify anomalous activities that can occur in a smart home environment. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is trained on network level sensor data, created from a test bed with multiple sensors and smart devices. The generated HMM model is shown to achieve an accuracy of 97% in identifying potential anomalies that indicate attacks. We present our approach to build this model and compare with other techniques available in the literature.