ZPA: A Smart Home Privacy Analysis System Based on ZigBee Encrypted Traffic

Currently, the ZigBee protocol is widely used in smart homes and provides convenience to people. However, smart home devices often carry a large amount of real physical world information, which may result in information leakage problems. In this paper, to reveal the privacy security issues existing in ZigBee-based smart home networks, we design a smart home privacy analysis system based on ZigBee-encrypted traffic, called ZPA. ZPA can extract ZigBee data features based on the device’s operating mode and time window and use state-of-the-art machine-learning models to identify the type and status of smart home devices that could leak users’ private information. Through the analysis of 20 different devices from 5 manufacturers, the results show that even if the ZigBee traffic is protected by encryption, the accuracy of the proposed method in device type identification and state inference can reach approximately 93% and 98%, respectively. The types and statuses of devices in smart homes will reveal the user’s activity information to a certain extent. The privacy security of ZigBee-based smart devices still needs to be further strengthened.