Can Allowlists Capture the Variability of Home IoT Device Network Behavior?

Weijia He, Kevin Bryson, Ricardo Calderon, Vijay Prakash, Nick Feamster, Danny Yuxing Huang, Blase Ur

Abstract: Home Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be difficult for users to secure. Prior work has suggested measuring these devices' network behaviors and using these characterizations to create allowlists of permitted endpoints. Unfortunately, previous studies have typically been conducted in controlled lab settings, with one or two devices per product. In this paper, we examine whether popular home IoT products' network behaviors generalize via both in-lab experiments of 24 devices and a large, crowdsourced dataset of IoT devices in the wild. We find that observing traffic from one device in one lab is often insufficient to fully characterize an IoT product's network behaviors. For example, specifying which endpoints a device may contact based on initial measurements in our lab led 25% of products to stop functioning later, and even more when using a VPN. We then used the crowdsourced dataset to better understand this traffic's heterogeneity and pinpoint how to create more generalizable allowlists. We identified causes of failure, such as regionalization, CDN usage, third-party integrations, and API changes. Finally, we used the crowdsourced data in numerous configurations to specify which endpoints each product in our lab could contact. We found that domain-level allowlists enabled the majority of devices to function in our lab using data collected years in the past. For the remaining devices, we characterize how to mitigate the failures observed and pave the way to creating more generalizable allowlists.