Sovereign: Self-Contained Smart Home With Data-Centric Network and Security
Published in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022
Recommended citation: Z. Zhang, T. Yu, X. Ma, Y. Guan, P. Moll and L. Zhang, "Sovereign: Self-Contained Smart Home With Data-Centric Network and Security," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 9, no. 15, pp. 13808-13822, 1 Aug.1, 2022, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2022.3144980. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2022.3144980
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 article, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home Internet of Things (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 approach 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.