When smart-home devices reach the end of their useful life and are sold or discarded, the security and privacy implications become significant if the devices are not cleansed of sensitive information. A discarded security camera, for example, might use non-volatile memory to store the passwords to both a home’s Wi-Fi network and to a cloud-based server that stores the images captured by the camera. If an adversary recovers these credentials from a discarded device, the adversary would gain access to the home and the cloud.
Our solution provides a mechanism for a device to autonomously detect conditions that require decommissioning and to automatically initiate that process. In short, devices running our protocol will discover when they are no longer ‘at home’, and trigger an internal function to erase any sensitive data and credentials.
Ravindra Mangar et al., “A Trigger for the Autonomous Decommissioning of Smart Devices,” Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Internet of Things, ACM, November 18, 2025, 174–82, https://doi.org/10.1145/3770501.3770522.
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