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arXiv · 2006.06131

Sovereign: User-Controlled Smart Homes

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.

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Zhiyi Zhang, Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Yu Guan, Philipp Moll, Lixia Zhang. 2020-06-11. Sovereign: User-Controlled Smart Homes. https://doi.org/10.1109/jiot.2022.3144980

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