Sensor-based Threats to Smart devices

Modern electronic devices become smart as well as omnipresent and it’s evident that smart devices are being applied to every possible application domain from small household devices to large industrial machines. The popularity of widely utilized smart devices places smart devices themselves as the center of attention among attackers. Smart devices are considered to be possible vehicles to launch attacks that attempts to exploit the security of smart devices via abusing the use of sensors, and this is an interesting and noteworthy emerging threat vector that impedes the security and privacy of smart devices. Because of the easy access to the prevalent sensors on smart devices and the limited security measures that consider these threats, we don’t need any complicated tools to access the sensors and are capable of executing sensor-based attacks without impeding the normal functions of devices. Malicious third party can exploit the sensors on a smart device so as to extract information, transfer malware to a device or trigger a malicious activity. Several countermeasures such as enhancing permissions for sensor access, information flow analysis have been proposed however depend on either user decision or availability of the source code of the apps. Moreover, the mentioned countermeasures cannot envision the passive sensor-based threats such as eavesdropping, triggering and transferring malware using sensors, abusing sensors using interference, etc. Therefore, the authors conduct this survey in order to investigate the deeper requirements and goals for preserving sensor security.

The contributions of this paper can be concluded as follows:

● First, they explore various threats and attacks abusing sensors of smart devices for malicious purposes.

● Second, they present a detailed survey about existing sensor-based threats and attacks to smart devices and countermeasures that have been developed to secure smart devices from sensor-based threats.

● Third, they provide a formal taxonomy of sensor-based threats to understand the attack mechanisms and effects on smart devices.

● Fourth, they present a taxonomy of existing solutions that specifically focus on mitigating sensor-based threats and introduce common vulnerability metrics to perform impact analysis of sensor-based threats to smart devices.

● Fifth, they discuss security and privacy issues of smart devices in the context of sensor-based threats and attacks, conclude with future research directions.