The privacy problems of smart home
Smart homes like Alexa are popular nowadays in many countries, the appearance of such artificial intelligence has gradually changed people’s daily life. They not only bring convenience to the users, but also bring some problems related to the online privacy.
In the application of the smart home, family is a unit and it is a private area, on the contrary, the internet is a relatively public, trustless area. The smart home links these two areas together, if there are no effective safeguarding measures, the privacy will be leak unconsciously.
The privacy problems related to the smart home can be divided into four categories.
The first one is that, the transmission of the data does not have a code, or the code is too easy to be cracked. For example, if the password of such activity is easy to be cracked, then during the process of transmitting the data to the cloud, these data will be intercepted or copied by the hacker.
The second category is that the client APP is not detected safely, and the relevant code is flawed. In such case, the hacker will take advantage of the flaw and get the users’ account and passwords for their illegal purpose such as stealing the money in the users’ account.
The third one is hardware devices have debugging interfaces or using operating systems or third-party libraries with security vulnerabilities. Under such circumstance, there is a high possibility that the hacker will intrude devices, or hijack device applications.
The last one is that the remote-control command lacks the authorization of reinforcement and has the risk of illegal invasion and hijacking of the application. An example is that the camera on the smart home can be used by the crackers through invading into the system.
In order to facilitate people's use of smart home and let people monitor and control the intelligent products in their home at any time, most smart home products have remote control commands sent from the cloud. And it is due to this kind of convenient means, if the product itself lacks safe defense means, it will bring huge risks related to the leaking of privacy to the users.
So, in order to prevent such problem, the managers and designers of smart home products should enhance their safety awareness, and in the process of developing smart products, they should not only focus on product functions and user experience, but also add security prevention measures to consider users' privacy risks. Also, consumers shall raise such awareness as well. only in this way, can the online privacy of the users be protected well.