Sovereign: User-Controlled Smart Homes
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Smart homes made up of Internet of Things (IoT) devices have seen wide deployment in recent years, with most, if not all, of them controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. We believe that the current situation has largely resulted from lacking a systematic home IoT framework to support localized end user control. To let end users take back the control of smart homes, we propose Sovereign, an IoT system framework that allows users to securely control home IoT systems without depending on a cloud backend. Unlike existing solutions, Sovereign networks home IoT devices and applications using named data with application-level semantics; the names are then used to construct security mechanisms. Users define security policies and these policies are then executed by the localized security modules. We implement Sovereign as a pub/sub based development platform together with a prototype local IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides an easy-to-use systematic solution to secure smart homes under user control without imposing noticeable overhead.
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