Soteria: Automated IoT Safety and Security Analysis

TL;DR

Soteria is a static analysis tool that verifies safety, security, and correctness properties of IoT applications and environments through code translation, state modeling, and model checking, revealing violations in real-world and test scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel static analysis system for IoT apps that can verify safety and security properties at the environment level, addressing limitations of existing platforms.

Findings

14% of apps violate at least one property

Combined app environments reveal additional violations

Successfully applied to a new IoT test suite with 20 violations

Abstract

Broadly defined as the Internet of Things (IoT), the growth of commodity devices that integrate physical processes with digital systems have changed the way we live, play and work. Yet existing IoT platforms cannot evaluate whether an IoT app or environment is safe, secure, and operates correctly. In this paper, we present Soteria, a static analysis system for validating whether an IoT app or IoT environment (collection of apps working in concert) adheres to identified safety, security, and functional properties. Soteria operates in three phases; (a) translation of platform-specific IoT source code into an intermediate representation (IR), (b) extracting a state model from the IR, (c) applying model checking to verify desired properties. We evaluate Soteria on 65 SmartThings market apps through 35 properties and find nine (14%) individual apps violate ten (29%) properties. Further, our study of combined app environments uncovered eleven property violations not exhibited in the isolated apps. Lastly, we demonstrate Soteria on MalIoT, a novel open-source test suite containing 17 apps with 20 unique violations.