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.