Long-Term Risks of IoT Devices: The Case of the Smart Fridge

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes long-term operational risks of smart fridges, revealing that basic functions like cooling are at risk due to ecosystem dependencies, with findings applicable to other IoT devices.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to identify long-term risks in smart appliances, focusing on ecosystem dependencies and potential vulnerabilities over device lifespan.

Findings

Cooling parameters depend on ecosystem components outside user control.

Basic functions like cooling are at risk in the long term.

No immediate threats to user safety were identified.

Abstract

Replacing conventional devices with smart ones has many advantages, e.g., a seamless integration of physical objects into the users digital environment or improved modes of use. However, if a conventional device is replaced by a smart device, its IT components can cause risks, that shorten the life of the device. Such risks stem from different life cycles of embedded soft- and hardware, libraries and protocols used, and the IT ecosystem required. This is problematic, because many conventional household appliances, say, a fridge or TV, have a much longer life span than typical IT equipment. In this paper, we use a systematic approach to identify long-term risks for the operational life span of a smart fridge. In particular, we identify 8 different use cases of three typical smart fridges, e.g., cooling or managing "best before" dates. We model the IT ecosystem needed to run these use cases, and we inspect each asset in this ecosystem for potential long-term risks. We found that even cooling, the most basic use case, is at risk in the long run. This is because the setting cooling parameters may depend on parts of the IT ecosystem that are not under the users control. On the other hand, we did not find any risk that may lead to harm of the category "threatening". Our findings on the smart fridge can be generalized to other smart devices easily.