Ruledger: Ensuring Execution Integrity in Trigger-Action IoT Platforms

Smart home IoT systems utilize trigger-action platforms, e.g., IFTTT, to\nmanage devices from various vendors. However, they may be abused by triggering\nmalicious rule execution with forged IoT devices or events violating the\nexecution integrity and the intentions of the users. To address this issue, we\npropose a ledger based IoT platform called Ruledger, which ensures the correct\nexecution of rules by verifying the authenticity of the corresponding\ninformation. Ruledger utilizes smart contracts to enforce verifying the\ninformation associated with rule executions, e.g., the user and configuration\ninformation from users, device events, and triggers in the trigger-action\nplatforms. In particular, we develop three algorithms to enable ledger-wallet\nbased applications for Ruledger and guarantee that the records used for\nverification are stateful and correct. Thus, the execution integrity of rules\nis ensured even if devices and platforms in the smart home systems are\ncompromised. We prototype Ruledger in a real IoT platform, i.e., IFTTT, and\nevaluate the performance with various settings. The experimental results\ndemonstrate Ruledger incurs an average of 12.53% delay, which is acceptable for\nsmart home systems.\n