Audio-Assisted Smart Home Security Monitoring with Few Samples

Haotian Chi, Qi Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Chenglong Fu, Yuwei Wang, Haijun Geng, Xiaojiang Du

Abstract: Smart home IoT devices have always been the target of various cyber attacks. By leveraging the smart home monitoring infrastructure, event-based anomaly detection is effective to detect anomalies that cause unfavorable working state of IoT devices. However, IoT events are proven to be vulnerable to event-targeted attacks which could be achieved by exploiting the vulnerabilities embedded in IoT devices, protocols and/or platforms. Thus, existing event-based anomaly detection is not robust in the case of unreliable input. To address this issue, our insight is that the embedded microphone components in many off-the-shelf home devices (e.g., smart doorbells, speakers, cameras, tablets, laptops, etc.) could be utilized to gather acoustic information to help increase the reliability and capability of smart home security monitoring systems. To verify this idea, we propose an audio-assisted framework IoTAudMon for detecting event-targeted attacks. Considering the heterogeneity and sparsity nature of smart homes IoT devices and events, we employ transfer learning to design a practical pipeline for extracting semantic information from audio, eliminating the requirement of human labeling and mitigating the cold start issue in existing solutions. Experiments on public datasets and real devices demonstrate the effectiveness of IoTAudMon.