SyntIoT: Privacy and security experimentation in consumer-oriented IoT ecosystems

Since the advent of consumer-oriented IoT products, like smart homes, researchers have taken up the challenge of shielding the consumers from the risks this technology entails, including privacy harms. However, security and privacy research is ‘hungry’ for open data (e.g., about the network traffic patterns of the devices) and open platforms to validate IoT-related solutions outside a pure simulation environment. Except for the few cases seen in the related work, datasets are not readily available to the research community and are difficult to produce in-house. Also, the reproducibility of research results and open science is hindered by the lack of an open experimentation platform (to test privacy and security solutions) that also offers a fine-grained control of the experimental setup. We present SyntIoT, a platform that allows researchers to easily deploy a complete IoT ecosystem (including devices, users, vendor clouds) into the physical world and at a low cost, hence lowering the barriers to entry in this research field. SyntIoT can be used to collect field data and to realistically validate security and privacy solutions. Our platform uses synthetic IoT devices that are fully configurable in a declarative way. Interestingly, our platform also allows commercial devices to be deployed alongside the synthetic ones. The platform provides an infrastructure to monitor the ecosystem and to extract rich data, which can be used for empirical research and data mining. This paper presents the platform, explains how it meets established research needs not yet answered in previous works, and highlights its usage in the context of three experimental scenarios.