English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

The popularity of smart-home assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa andGoogle Home leads to a booming third-party application market (over 70,000applications across the two stores). While existing works have revealedsecurity issues in these systems, it is not well understood how to helpapplication developers to enforce security requirements. In this paper, weperform a preliminary case study to examine the security vetting mechanismsadopted by Amazon Alexa and Google Home app stores. With a focus on theauthentication mechanisms between Alexa/Google cloud and third-partyapplication servers (i.e. endpoints), we show the current security vetting isinsufficient as developer mistakes can not be effectively detected andnotified. A weak authentication would allow attackers to spoof the cloud toinsert/retrieve data into/from the application endpoints. We validate theattack through ethical proof-of-concept experiments. To confirm vulnerableapplications have indeed passed the security vetting and entered the markets,we develop a heuristic-based searching method. We find 219 real-world Alexaendpoints that carry the vulnerability, many of which are related to criticalapplications that control smart home devices and electronic cars. We havenotified Amazon and Google about our findings and offered our suggestions tomitigate the issue.

Security Vetting Process of Smart-home Assistant Applications: A First Look and Case Studies