Device discovery and identification with multipurpose privacy tags

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become increasingly common in households, workplaces, and public spaces. Whether we are aware of them, we live surrounded by IoT devices that constantly gather their environment data. This fact poses security and privacy issues for individuals as third parties may collect their information without their information. A solution is needed to alert the user of each IoT device’s existence, location, and functionalities. We propose multipurpose privacy tags attached to host IoT devices to address this issue. These tags use several wireless technologies to provide different interaction capabilities, and any user can use these capabilities through our Android application. To the best of our knowledge, using wireless tags to identify, discover, or localize IoT devices is a novel solution to the privacy problem that emerged from IoT devices. Furthermore, privacy tags are multipurpose as users can use them for other reasons than privacy, such as inventory or lost item tracking. Unlike other popular devices used as tags in the market, such as Apple Airtag or Tiles, our tags do not have to be configured beforehand with a mobile phone. We will present several privacy tag models that use different combinations of wireless protocols through ubiquitous hobbyist boards, such as Arduino or Adafruit models. We will test the feasibility of each privacy tag in terms of our predefined metrics, such as price, power consumption, or coverage range. Afterward, we will illustrate which tags may be suitable for specific scenarios.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Kaplan, Berkay

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gunter, Carl

• Wireless
• IoT
• Privacy

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Berkay Kaplan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115828

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115828