Future Spaces: Reinventing the Home Network for Better Security and Automation in the IoT Era

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are complex systems comprising computation, physical, and networking assets. Used in various domains such as manufacturing, agriculture, vehicles, etc., they blend the control of the virtual and physical worlds. Smart homes are a peculiar type of CPS where the local networking fundamentals have seen little evolution in the past decades, while the context in which home networks operate has drastically evolved. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number and diversity of devices connected to our home networks are exploding. Some of those devices are poorly secured and put users’ data privacy and security at risk. At the same time, administrating a home network has remained a tedious chore, requiring skills from un-savvy users. We present Future Spaces, an end-to-end hardware-software prototype providing fine-grained control over IoT connectivity to enable easy and secure management of smart homes. Relying on Software-Defined Networking-enabled home gateways and the virtualization of network functions in the cloud, we achieve advanced networking security and automation through the definition of isolated, usage-oriented slices. This disrupts how users discover, control and share their connected assets across multiple domains, smoothly adapting to various usage contexts.