Our state of the art IoT Testbed is instrumental to a number of research projects, government regulation reports, TV documentaries, and independent investigations into the security and privacy of smart devices. The testbed consists of over 140 various consumer IoT devices, state of the art network and device performance monitoring (through BatteryLab), and various automation techniques. Through close collaboration with friends at Northeastern University, We also make our testbed configuration and publications' datasets available to researchers worldside. Please see below for specific articles, papers, and datasets. We also make various IoT device signatures and destination lists available through the IoTrim Project. Our team has won one of the TOP 10 spots in the Telekom Challenge Development Stream. We have received a generous gift and an InnovateUK Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP) grant, supporting our efforts to accelerate IoT Security and to develop IoTrim. Stay tuned for more news!

Publications:

• Vadim Safronov, Anna Maria Mandalari, Daniel J. Dubois, , David Choffnes, Hamed Haddadi, “SunBlock: Cloudless Protection for IoT Systems”, Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2024 (PAM 2024), March 2024, Virtual. Paper available on ArXiv.

• Anna Maria Mandalari, Hamed Haddadi, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes, “Protected or Porous: A Comparative Analysis of Threat Detection Capability of IoT Safeguards”, 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2023), May 22-25, 2023, San Francisco, CA, & Online. Paper available on ArXiv, Code and Data.

• Oliver Thompson, Anna Maria Mandalari, Hamed Haddadi, “Rapid IoT Device Identification at the Edge”, 2nd Workshop on Distributed Machine Learning (DistributedML 2021), co-located with CoNEXT 2021, December 7-10, 2021, Munich, Germany. (Paper available on ArXiv)

• Anna Maria Mandalari, Daniel J. Dubois, Roman Kolcun, Muhammad Talha Paracha, Hamed Haddadi, David Choffnes, “Blocking without Breaking: Identification and Mitigation of Non-Essential IoT Traffic”, in 21st Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2021), July 12–16, 2021, On the Internet. (Paper and code available on IoTrim)

• Said Jawad Saidi, Anna Maria Mandalari, Roman Kolcun, Hamed Haddadi, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes, Georgios Smaragdakis, Anja Feldmann, “A Haystack Full of Needles: Scalable Detection of IoT Devices in the Wild”, in ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2020, October 2020, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. (Paper and data available)

• Daniel J. Dubois, Roman Kolcun, Anna Maria Mandalari, Muhammad Talha Paracha, David Choffnes, Hamed Haddadi, “When Speakers Are All Ears: Characterizing Misactivations of IoT Smart Speakers”, in proceedings of the 20th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2020), July 14–18, 2020, Montréal, Canada. (Paper, Webpage, Code, and Dataset, NYTimes, The Independent, and USA Today, BBC Panorama program Youtube Link, BBC News, Channel 4 The Truth About Amazon, NYT lead editorial, Vox, ZDNet, Telegraph, Gizmodo, GeekWire, Forbes, BusinessInsider)

• Anna Maria Mandalari, Roman Kolcun, Hamed Haddadi, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes, “Towards Automatic Identification and Blocking of Non-Critical IoT Traffic Destinations”, Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro ’20), Co-located with the 41th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 21, 2020, San Francisco, CA. (Paper available on ArXiv)

• Ranya Aloufi, Hamed Haddadi, David Boyle, “Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants”, in Privacy Preserving Machine Learning, ACM CCS 2019 Workshop, November 2019, London, UK. (Available on ArXiv, Articles on Vice, Medium)

• Jingjing Ren, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes, Anna Maria Mandalari, Roman Kolcun, Hamed Haddadi, “Information Exposure From Consumer IoT Devices: A Multidimensional, Network-Informed Measurement Approach”, in ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2019 (IMC 2019), October, 2019, Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Community Contribution Award) (paper and code and dataset, Financial Times article, The Times article, Vice article, BBC News, BBC Click program, Ars Technica)

Media coverage:

• Consumer Reports: Connected Devices Share More Data Than Needed
• Channel 4 – The Truth About Amazon
• BBC News – Why Amazon knows so much about you
• BBC One (Panorama program) – Amazon: What They Know About Us (YouTube Link)
• BBC and BBC Click program on GDPR Anniversary (YouTube link)
• USA Today – It’s not you, it’s them: Google, Alexa and Siri may answer even if you haven’t called
• The Independent – Smart Speakers Could Accidentally Record Users up to 19 Times Per Day, Study Reveals
• The New York Times –  Are Alexa and Google Assistant spying on us?
• Which? – Are Alexa and Google Assistant spying on us?
•  Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation first series of three snapshot papers on ethical issues in AI including Smart Speakers and Voice Assistants