Oversensing in the Home

Had not heard the term before: 'Oversensing'.  But sensors do create security implications.

How to Curtail Oversensing in the Home
By Connor Bolton, Kevin Fu, Josiah Hester, Jun Han
Communications of the ACM, June 2020, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 20-24   10.1145/3396261

Future homes will employ potentially hundreds of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whose sensors may inadvertently leak sensitive information. A previous Communications Inside Risks column ("The Future of the Internet of Things," Feb. 2017) discusses how the expected scale of the IoT introduces threats that require considerations and mitigations.2 Future homes are an IoT hotspot that will be particularly at risk. Sensitive information such as passwords, identification, and financial transactions are abundant in the home—as are sensor systems such as digital assistants, smartphones, and interactive home appliances that may unintentionally capture this sensitive information. IoT device manufacturers should employ sensor sensor permissioning systems to limit applications access to only sensor data required for operation, reducing the risk that malicious applications may gain sensitive information. For example, a simple notepad application should not have microphone access.

However, even if this least-privilege approach was enacted across all IoT systems (a difficult task), sensor systems still gather much more information than intended or required by an application—for example, how motion sensors can capture nearby sounds, including words and keystrokes. We call this oversensing: where authorized access to sensor data provides an application with superfluous and potentially sensitive information. Manufacturers and system designers must employ the principle of least privilege at a more fine-grained level and with awareness of how often different sensors overlap in the sensitive information they leak. We project that directing technical efforts toward a more holistic conception of sensor data in system design and permissioning will reduce risks of oversensing.... ."