UC Santa Cruz

With the recent increase in popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), many companies quickly developed new devices using this technology to stake a claim in a blooming industry. While taking advantage of this technology has yielded many benefits and conveniences in the past few years, the glaring issue of security has not been properly addressed. We have seen many recent attacks on children through IoT devices, and while security mechanisms do exist and are available for use, users without a technical background generally may not see the risks as something worth putting effort into mitigating.

In this thesis, we perform a network analysis on some of the existing smart devices available on the market and collect survey data from parents about their understanding of IoT technologies. We form a generalizable mental model of parents and IoT devices as well as a threat model of possible attack vectors. We then address the issues found in our research and provide recommendations for developers to improve their IoT system security.