Open Access

Frederik Möllers, Stephanie Vogelgesang, Jochen Krüger, Isao Echizen, Christoph Sorge

• With Home Automation Systems steadily gaining popularity and affordability, the threat of attacks on these installations is increasing. Previous research has shown that passive adversaries can obtain considerable amounts of information about the users' habits and about how they interact with their system. Although encryption and other measures to ensure condentiality in communication are becoming a standard, traffic analysis remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we take a look at different research areas and show that existing solutions cannot be easily applied to this scenario. However, we establish a model for traffic analysis in Home Automation Systems which leverages existing research on Private Information Retrieval. Using this model, both attacks and countermeasures can be analysed and their effectiveness can be measured to yield comparable results. We also take a look at legal aspects, highlighting problem areas and recent developments in the interaction between technology such as Home Automation and legislature.