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

Abstract

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.

Survey on Network Slicing for Internet of Things Realization in 5G Networks

“…In their scheme, smart home applications are sliced into four different classes according to their usage, bandwidth requirements and traffic type. In [126], Boussard et al presented an end-to-end research solution, called Future Spaces, based on SDN and NFV, to dynamically control people's digital assets. They have used network slices to provide secure access to devices.…”

Network Slicing: Recent Advances, Taxonomy, Requirements, and Open Research Challenges

“…In [25], Boussard et al proposed a secure prototype named future spaces using SDN and NFV as the key enabling technologies for IoT asset management in smart homes. The authors considered group-based slicing for achieving fine-grained control of the smart home network.…”

Current Research Trends in IoT Security: A Systematic Mapping Study

“…A study has been conducted to design a secure IoT microcontroller module using the Raspberry Pi platform and various IoT sensors [115][116][117]. To achieve flexible device utilization, heterogeneous device interoperability, security enhancement of smart homes, and software-defined networks (SDN) have been applied [118,119].…”