Helion: Enabling Natural Testing of Smart Homes

TL;DR

Helion is a system that uses language modeling to generate realistic smart home automation scenarios, enabling more practical testing of smart home security and safety systems.

Contribution

It introduces Helion, a novel approach leveraging n-gram language models to predict natural home automation scenarios for testing purposes.

Findings

Helion effectively predicts realistic automation routines.

HelionHA integrates Helion with Home Assistant for practical testing.

The system enhances testing realism for smart home security.

Abstract

Prior work has developed numerous systems that test the security and safety of smart homes. For these systems to be applicable in practice, it is necessary to test them with realistic scenarios that represent the use of the smart home, i.e., home automation, in the wild. This demo paper presents the technical details and usage of Helion, a system that uses n-gram language modeling to learn the regularities in user-driven programs, i.e., routines developed for the smart home, and predicts natural scenarios of home automation, i.e., event sequences that reflect realistic home automation usage. We demonstrate the HelionHA platform, developed by integrating Helion with the popular Home Assistant smart home platform. HelionHA allows an end-to-end exploration of Helion's scenarios by executing them as test cases with real and virtual smart home devices.