Helion: Enabling Natural Testing of Smart Homes

Abstract

Prior work has developed numerous systems that test the security and safety of smart homes. For these systems to be applicable in practice, it is necessary to test them with realistic scenarios that represent the use of the smart home, i.e., home automation, in the wild. This demo paper presents the technical details and usage of Hεlion, a system that uses n-gram language modeling to learn the regularities in user-driven programs, i.e., routines developed for the smart home, and predicts natural scenarios of home automation, i.e., event sequences that reflect realistic home automation usage. We demonstrate the HεlionHA platform, developed by integrating Hεlion with the popular Home Assistant platform. HεlionHA allows an end-to-end exploration of Hεlion’s scenarios by executing them as test cases with real and virtual smart home devices. The demo video can be found here: https://youtu.be/o9g0wKiJJMI