The Matter Smart Home Standard

Photo by John Tekeridis on Pexels.com

Matter is a royalty-free smart home standard that promotes platform and device interoperability. Built on the Internet Protocol, Matter enables communication across smart home devices and ecosystems over a variety of IP-based networking technologies, such as Thread, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet.

The persistent need for an Internet connection experienced by modern IoT devices is likewise addressed by the Matter smart home standard. Indeed, Matter products run locally and do not rely on an Internet connection, although the standard is designed to readily communicate with the cloud.

Security is a fundamental premise of Matter. Matter functional security includes the following five characteristics:

  • Comprehensive – Matter is an open-source framework designed to provide comprehensive security with a layered approach that includes authentication, attestation, message protection and firmware updates, relying solely on its own security features and not on external communication protocols.
  • Strong – Matter implements a variety of security techniques, including a cryptosuite based on AES, SHA-256, and ECC, as well as passcode-based session and certificate-based establishment protocols. It also adopts device attestation and the CSA Distributed Compliance Ledger to guarantee a compliant and interoperable ecosystem.
  • Easy to use – Matter security is a smart device platform designed to make the implementation and use of smart devices much easier for device makers and consumers alike. It comes with open source reference implementations and well-defined security assets, making it a secure and simple solution for customers.
  • Resilient – Matter security is designed to protect, detect, and recover data, utilizing multiple protocols and measures to prevent denial of service attacks and provide resilience even when sleeping devices are involved.
  • Agile – Matter is a crypto-flexible protocol that abstracts cryptographic primitives, enabling the specification to be quickly changed or upgraded in response to new security threats. The modular design also allows for individual protocols to be replaced without completely overhauling the whole system.

Matter is paving the way for a secure and reliable connected home of the future. With its comprehensive security and ability to operate without an Internet connection, Matter is the ideal choice for modern IoT devices. It is revolutionizing the way home devices communicate, providing a safe and secure environment for the connected home of the future.

Read more here: https://csa-iot.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Matter_Security_and_Privacy_WP_March-2022.pdf and https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/

Investigating Privacy Threats in Smart Homes

On Tuesday, I gave a presentation at PerCom 2020. This was the first time, the conference was held completely online (due to the global pandemic of COVID-19), and speakers were asked to deliver their presentations remotely over Zoom.

In my case, I gave two live presentations in the Work In Progress (WiP) session being chaired by Diane Cook.  During this time, I discussed how smart connected homes can be formally modeled so that privacy threats can be systematically identified and analyzed.  Take a look at my short teaser clip below.

In case you are interested in the accompanying poster for my presentation, you can access it either from my Presentations menu tab or otherwise by clicking here.  Also, I have uploaded the slides for the video which you can access here.

As always, please feel free to contact me in case you want to know more about this paper, and about security and privacy in general. Finally, I want to remind and encourage you to submit to PerCom or its workshops. You can get some high-quality feedback on your work that can help you improve it and more.