Discovering Complex Correlations Among Multiple IoT Devices in Smart Environments

Andrew D'Angelo, Chenglong Fu, Xiaojiang Du, E. Paul Ratazzi

Abstract: The ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a vast range of consumer applications is unparalleled. Unfortunately, despite the benefits of IoT, its widespread integration comes with significant security challenges. Considering IoT devices' capability to interact with the physical environment, there is an urgent need for effective anomaly detection. The state-of-the-art anomaly detection method, HAWatcher, models the normal behaviors of smart homes with inter-device correlations and demonstrates great results. Nonetheless, it is limited to capturing only simple one-to-one correlations between two events or states, which undermines its capability to detect anomalies in more complicated environments. To address this issue, we present a novel correlation discovering method to mine complex two-to-one correlations in such complicated IoT-enabled environments. We conduct experiments over two weeks on four smart home testbeds and obtain 70 two-to-one correlations. The correlations are applied to 9 anomaly scenarios, which show significant improvements in detecting anomalies over one-to-one correlations.