Core Competency

Security issues, Countermeasures, and mitigation mechanisms of the Home Assistant sensing layer.

For the concerns raised in the sensing, some mitigations that can be applied are as follows:
1. Node Capture: allows an attacker to gain total control of a vital node, such as a cluster head.
2. Eavesdropping: This is an unauthorised data interception real-time attack allowing the attacker Intercept communications on a channel (Burhan et al., 2018)
3. Fake Node: In this attack, an attacker gains physical access to the cluster adding a rogue node to a system designed to accept data and send out dummy data. A node that transmits actual data is attacked, taking energy from legitimate nodes, and possibly ruining the network.
4. Timing Attack: This is a rare attack where an attacker finds and exploits system weaknesses to steal data. They do this by timing the system`s response to an input, query, or algorithm.
5. Playback Attack: This is sometimes known as `Relay Attack. The attack can lead to data loss, reputation, and identity theft, as the attacker intercepts communication between the sender and the receiver, relaying false information to both the sender and receiver for gains. The flaw occurs because authentication is well distributed in IoT Systems (Swamy, Jadhav and Kulkarni, Feb 2017) .
6. Denial of Service: It occurs when an attacker tries to flood the sink node with a high volume of requests, leading to resource exhaustion and a hindrance to legitimate traffic (Frustaci et al., 2018).