Matter Protocol Integration Using Espressif’s Solutions to Achieve Smart Home Interoperability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper explains the overview of communication protocol Matter, describes the development of a Matter Accessory using ESP32-S3, and claims that the development is simple.

In the sub-section 2.2.3, "Device development," the reviewer could not judge that how simple was the development because the development seems just compiling a sample project and it was not compared with other cases. 

In the sub-section 3, "Results and Discussion," the line 342, this paper claims "With this, performance and interoperability can be assessed." However, there is no comparison with other cases. So the reviewer could not judge that the performance and interoperability are good or bad.

Listing 1 to Listing 4 are not cited in the contents. It is hard to understand the Listing 4 of the subsection 3.1 "Initial behavior." because the mean of each line in the listing 4 is not shown in the body of the subsection. In the lines 391-403, correspondence between each behavior in the body and a line in the wireshark's log of the Figure 7 is not shown. So it is hard to understand the body of the subsection.

The above problem can be applied to the subsection 3.2

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This work focuses on the issue of interoperability among various manufacturers, protocols, and environments, which impedes the wider adoption of smart home ecosystems. It introduces "Matter" as an emerging solution—an open-source application layer protocol designed to work across all smart home ecosystems. The paper details the development and integration of a Matter Accessory using an ESP32-S3, facilitated by manufacturer's SDKs, into an existing home network. The simplicity of device commissioning and control, along with network interactions, is highlighted, showing how Matter simplifies development for producers and enhances user experience.

Advantages:

1.    This work studies a very important topic, that is, the smart ecosystem’s issue of interoperability among various manufacturers, protocols, and environments.

2.    The author proposes a prototype of a Matter Accessory using an ESP32-S3 for enhancing the ecosystem’s universality.

3.    This work can bring new inspiration to related fields and technology development.

Shortcomings:

1.    The author needs to thoroughly check for unclear descriptions and typos. For instance, “devices providing Ambient Intelligence [1? ,2]” should be corrected; “802.11 radios due to its widespread availability” should be revised as “…due to their widespread…”; “the following steps [33,34].:” should be “…steps [33,34]:”.

2.    This paper lacks some discussion about the relevant fields and work. Although the addition of a Matter Accessory can enhance the universality of the smart home ecosystem, the new module may introduce new attack vectors and compromise system security, thereby posing new security risks. For instance, side-channel attacks and perturbation attacks could occur once the devices are connected to the WiFi network. The author should discuss the potential attacks brought about by the Matter Accessory, based on the security risks associated with the WiFi module and energy harvesting module. The references listed below might be helpful in addressing this issue.

·       Ni, Tao, et al. "Eavesdropping Mobile App Activity via {Radio-Frequency} Energy Harvesting." 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 23). 2023.

·       Ni, Tao, et al. "Exploiting Contactless Side Channels in Wireless Charging Power Banks for User Privacy Inference via Few-shot Learning." Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 2023.

·       Liu, Jianwei, et al. "Time to Think the Security of WiFi-Based Behavior Recognition Systems." IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2023).

·       Cao, Hangcheng, et al. "Security Analysis of WiFi-based Sensing Systems: Threats from Perturbation Attacks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.15587 (2024).

·       Zhou, Yuxuan, et al. "RIStealth: Practical and Covert Physical-Layer Attack against WiFi-based Intrusion Detection via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface." Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. 2023.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

NA

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

My conditions of acceptance has been fulfilled.