Sovereign: User-Controlled Smart Homes

TL;DR

Sovereign is a novel home IoT framework that empowers users with complete control, enabling secure, direct device communication and addressing privacy concerns inherent in cloud-controlled smart homes.

Contribution

It introduces Sovereign, a user-controlled IoT system that secures device communication via semantic naming and direct data exchange, improving privacy and security.

Findings

Provides secure, direct device communication without cloud reliance

Uses semantic names for constructing security solutions

Operates on existing IoT hardware with minimal overhead

Abstract

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.