Private Memoirs of IoT Devices: Safeguarding User Privacy in the IoT Era

The rise of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) holds great promise to transform people's lives by making society more efficient in many areas, including energy, transportation, healthcare, commerce, manufacturing, etc. At their core, IoT devices use sensors to collect data on real-world physical processes and then transmit it over the Internet to cloud servers, which store, process, and learn from the data to better optimize these processes, either directly (by issuing remote commands that actuate IoT devices) or indirectly (by issuing notifications that direct users to take some action). Unfortunately, IoT devices also expose users to multiple new types of privacy attacks. In particular, the sensor data collected from IoT devices can indirectly reveal a variety of sensitive private information. In addition, users generally connect IoT devices to local networks, which they implicitly trust, with little understanding of what the IoT device is doing on the network. In this visionpaper, we discuss recent work on sensor data privacy in the context of smart energy systems to provide examples of i) the surprising types of private information we can glean from seemingly innocuous IoT data and ii) the different types of defenses we have developed to preserve IoT data privacy for smart energy systems. These defenses lie at different discrete points in the tradeoff between user privacy and IoT functionality, which motivates ongoing work on developing defenses that provide a more tunable tradeoff. We also discuss the privacy implications of connecting tens-to-hundreds of untrusted IoT devices to implicitly trusted local networks, and avenues for research to mitigate these concerns.