A Survey on Physical Event Verification in User-centric Smart Home Systems

Recent advances in IoT technologies have led to the rise of home automation (HA) systems, greatly improving users’ daily life quality. With the growing use of smart devices in homes, event sensors play a key role by reporting physical events like doors opening or lights turning on, automatically or manually. However, these sensor reports can be unreliable due to faults or active attackers, leading to false events (event spoofing). This is critical, as smart homes can trigger event chains without user involvement. Therefore, verifying the authenticity of physical events is important in securing smart home automation systems. Despite increasing attention from academia and industry, no survey has yet summarized HA systems’ security research on physical event verification. This paper provides a comprehensive review of physical event verification and future research directions.