Each student will write a XXXXXXXXXXpage) paper based on research of a reported incident of design flaw of a particular cyber product. The incident or flaw is to be related to cybersecurity. The paper...

Design Flaws in “Smart Home” Internet of Things Devices    4
DESIGN FLAWS IN “SMART HOME” INTERNET OF THINGS DEVICES
Table of Contents
Introduction    3
Analysis    3
Conclusion    7
References    8
Introduction
Internet of Things (IOT) are the physical devices which are embedded with sensors, software and various other technologies which are used for connecting and exchange of data with various devices through the internet. These devices are mostly the gadgets used for household purposes. Further, there are more than 7 billion IOT devices till now and is expected to grow by 22 billion by 2025. The devices are in the form of kitchen appliances, thermostats, instruments or devices for monitoring of the baby and even cars. Within these devices there is internet which is embedded which allows continuous communication between the human beings, system and the devices. Further, these devices with are cost low and uses various modern forms of technologies such as the cloud computing, big data analytics and the mobile application technologies for collecting and sharing of data with minimized human efforts. Hence, it is the use of low-cost sensory technology for connecting the physical world of the human beings with the virtual or digital world (Oracle, 2022).
Recently, few researchers of the North Carolina University have detected some flaws in the smart home IOT devices. Further, these smart home IOT devices allows the third parties who uses these devices avoid exchange of information and important data. Further, the researchers also discovered that due to these flaws in the smart home devices, the security system signaling might fail to work effectively. Also, due to the poor signaling as a result of flaws found in the smart home devices, there might be a break-in or the intruders’ videos might not get uploaded. As a part of the research team a solution will be discovered which can address the vulnerabilities easily.
Analysis
The smart home IOT devices are becoming very common and are used by human beings in their daily lives. This increase in the usage of smart home devices by the people is due to the expectations that such devices will be able to deliver high level of security and protect them from any forms of uncertainty. Yet, there are various flaws which are discovered in these smart home devices which disallows the owner of the house or property to get or generate information of the uncertainty or problems in the premises.
Therefore, despite the advantages associated with the smart homes IOT devices, there are several flaws or disadvantages associated with the devices. There are two most crucial challenges while using the smart home IOT devices are data privacy and security issues. These smart home devices collect huge amount of data of the owners or the occupants and hence this increases the chances and the risk of the device getting hacked or the information getting leaked. By capturing the unencrypted messages from the smart home devices, the hackers are easily able to get access to the stored data. These data consist of bank details, the location and even health related records of the device owners. Further, the data of the smart home IOT devices are mostly stored in the cloud-based servers. Even these servers are vulnerable to external cyber-attacks. Hence, there can be data leak possible from both the cloud servers or the IOT devices. Further, there can be instances of third-party cyber-attacks and data leaks of the IOT device. The best example is of the Ring Smart Doorbell which send information of the customers to Facebook and Google without even taking any valid legal consent from the customers. It was due to the third-party tracking services linked to the Ring mobile app due to which the information and data of the customers were available with the social media sites (Katrenko and Semeniak, 2022).
Another greatest flaw of smart homes IOT devices is that these devices are susceptible to continuous cyberattacks. The most common types of cyberattacks on these smart homes’ devices are denial of service. Since these smart home devices have comparatively smaller processor hence, they have restricted processing power which makes it highly exposed to cyber-attacks such as denial of services. Due to this attack, the device is unable to respond due to high traffic. Secondly, it is denial of sleep where the device which operates through battery is preserved in sleep mode but gets drained and also the sensor becomes disabled as the hackers are able to take control of the medium access control. Thirdly, it can result in the smart device spoofing where due to a poor public key infrastructure the hackers are able to spoof or get access of the device and interrupt the arrangement of IOT. Fourthly, attackers can attack a device either physically or remotely and tamper the device which makes the smart home device defective. Finally, the hackers may use software which can recognize the weaknesses in the cloud server and destroy the smart home IOT device (Katrenko and Semeniak, 2022).
The researchers have identified that if the third parties are able to hack the router of the owner or have access to the password of the router, then they can upload a network layer suppression malware inside the router. The malware is uploaded in such a manner that will support the uploading of the heartbeat signals and will reflect that they are operative and online, but will block the signaling process with respect to the security. It will operate just like a motion sensor when activated. Hence, these destruction and suppressive attacks can be conducted by the hackers both remotely as well as on-site. The only way to protect the owners of the smart home devices from being attacked by hackers and security of the data is that the producers of these devices must guarantee that their products are safe, equipped with the latest anti-virus and the data which are input and stored by the device are encrypted properly so that they cannot be accessed by the third parties. Further, most of the routers are unsecured as they use generic password such as ‘admin’. This makes it easier for the hacker to do permutation and combinations and get access to the device which is connected to the router of the individuals. The first thing the owner of the smart home IOT device can do is get the Wi-Fi network secured with a strong password and keep it undisclosed. Further, many hackers are able to easy hack the router due to it having a specific model...