CCI SMARTHOME LAB

The CCI SmartHome Lab is for UNC Charlotte students and faculty who intend to conduct research in an exciting new space. This is facilitated with the hardware and software in the lab that emulates a “smart home” environment. A variety of research topics can be pursued with the resources the IoT lab provides; this ranges from hardware security to usability studies for IoT devices.

The lab is split up into two sections. It contains a traditional lab environment that holds workstations and space for collaboration. The rest of the lab has been configured to represent a real, functioning living room in a typical smart home. This area contains many of the WiFi-connected devices that have become commonplace in households.

The SmartHome Lab has produced many impressive projects and papers. Summaries of such achievements can be found below. Further inquiries can be sent to cci-smarthomelab@uncc.edu

Practical Experience Report: Exploiting Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities in Connman for IoT Devices
-K. Virgil English, Islam Obaidat, and Meera Sridhar

Students and Faculty who work in the UNC Charlotte SmartHome Lab conducted research into the feasibility of taking control over consumer IoT devices using memory exploits. Experiments were conducted such as crashing and executing arbitrary code on the targeted software application. This research was presented at the The 49th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks.