Big Brother is Watching You: Non-Intrusive ZigBee User Profiling

The rise of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and smart homes has resulted in the increased use of ZigBee as the communication protocol of choice in home networks, giving ample opportunity for network monitoring and user profiling, as a consequence, raising a major privacy concern. Yet, there has been little exploration of the extractable information solely from network packets, particularly Philips Hue packets.Especially as, to the authors’ knowledge, there have been no studies examining whether a single network key provides enough generalization to extract data from other unknown ZigBee networks. To address this gap, this paper proposes StealthProfiler, a passive and real-time Proof-of-Concept (PoC) tool designed to identify, classify, and extract devices and events within a Philips Hue network.As a result, the tool was successfully used to extract network events from encrypted Zigbee networks, achieving an accuracy of approximately 94% in identifying devices and events within the network without decrypting network traffic.