Toward a Privacy Guard for Cloud-Based Home Assistants and IoT Devices

摘要

The Internet of Things is a technology which is dominating our lives, making it more comfortable, safer and smarter. Using smart speakers as voice assistants for smart homes provides valuable service and an easy control of IoT devices, despite allowing the emergence of privacy threats and disclosing sensitive data about users. In this paper, we propose to associate with any smart personal assistant a privacy guard gateway (PGG for short) in order to mitigate privacy issues related to cloud-based devices, like profiling and linkage. In an original way, the PGG system is based on a noise addition mechanism that injects dummy requests according to some selected strategy, without the user's activities being stored during the operation. A case study of our approach is experimented with a Google Home Assistant, in order to show its effectiveness.