Analyzing Data Consistency in Smart Home Applications.

Smart Home applications are a quickly growing segment of the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Many companies offer cloud platforms that enable developers to create and run applications that provide specific Smart Home functions for physical devices installed and connected to the Internet in people's homes. Unfortunately, problems and vulnerabilities relating to data consistency have emerged for these Smart Home platforms, stemming from interfaces that have limited and varied guarantees with respect to atomicity, data consistency, and event ordering. These data consistency concerns are important because many applications are related to devices used for home security and control systems, like smart locks. The Amazon AWS IoT platform enables Internet-connected devices to connect to the AWS Cloud and lets applications in the cloud interact with Internet-connected devices. Because of its many configurable options, the AWS IoT API makes it easy for developers to write applications that do not correctly handle concurrency and data consistency issues, resulting in lost or incorrect state updates. We have developed a static analysis tool for AWS IoT JavaScript applications that detects when software may experience data consistency issues due to how the AWS IoT API was configured and used. We deployed our tool on 10 JavaScript applications in our preliminary analysis; most of these applications could experience erroneous updates of state in the cloud.