Transparent Microsegmentation for Smart Home Security | Avast

This Thursday and Friday, June 25th and 26th, come join us at the USENIX HotEdge ‘20 workshop, a digital event bringing together researchers, academics, and experts in edge computing to share their ideas, discuss research, and identify the newest trends emerging in this important area.

Our own Avast Senior Data Scientist Armin Wasicek will present a new paper entitled “Transparent Microsegmentation in Smart Home IoT Networks,” which he developed with Amr Osman and Stefan Köpsell researchers from Germany’s Technical University of Dresden, and Thorsten Strufe, researcher from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Aside from being a mouthful of syllables, “transparent microsegmentation” is the key to practical 5G smart home security, as isolating devices in the home network can drastically reduce the attack surface of a smart home by 65%.

“Smart home IoT devices are typically online 24/7,” said Armin. “Once an attacker successfully gains access to one smart device, the entire network – including all other IoT devices connected to it – is at risk.” Armin and the team from TU Dresden explain in the paper how they implement network functions to enforce fine-grained network security in 5G smart homes. The first function inventories all the connected devices, and the second function allocates the devices into dynamic microsegments, isolating them from one another. 

This security approach guarantees that should any device get hacked, the breach will be contained within that segmented part of the network, enabling the rest of the smart home network to continue functioning normally, untouched by the hack. This is the system smart home owners will need to adopt to protect themselves from having one infected device take down their entire household. Check out Armin’s presentation at HotEdge ‘20 for more info, and read the paper to learn why transparent microsegmentation is the security solution that takes smart home security to the next level.