Sovereign: User-Controlled Smart Homes
This addresses privacy and security issues for smart home users by providing a user-controlled alternative to cloud-based systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing IoT hardware and publish-subscribe models.
The authors tackled the security and privacy concerns of cloud-controlled smart homes by designing Sovereign, a framework that enables user-controlled, self-contained smart homes with direct, secure device-to-device communication, and preliminary evaluation shows it runs on existing IoT hardware without noticeable overhead.
Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this paper, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home IoT system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This enables direct, secure, one-to-one and one-to-many device-to-device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish-subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.