TAPGuard: A Semantic-Aware Graph Framework for TAP Rule Cascading Threat Detection

This research proposes TAPGuard, a framework for detecting cascading threats in Trigger-Action Programming (TAP, a system where one event automatically triggers another action, commonly used in smart home devices). The framework uses large language models (AI systems trained on text) to understand the semantic meaning (the actual intent and meaning, not just the structure) of automation rules and identifies two types of threats: explicit ones from direct device interactions and implicit ones from rules sharing environmental variables that shouldn't interact. TAPGuard performs better than existing methods at catching these dangerous rule combinations.