My House, My Rules: A Private-by-Design Smart Home Platform

Smart home technology has gained widespread adoption. However, several instances of massive corporate surveillance and episodes of sensor data breaches have raised many privacy concerns amongst potential consumers. This paper presents PatrIoT, a private-by-design IoT platform for smart home environments. PatrIoT revisits the typical architecture of existing IoT platforms, and provides an alternative design where the home owner retains full ownership and control of smart device generated data. It leverages Intel SGX to prevent unauthorized access to the data by untrusted IoT cloud providers, and offers homeowners an intuitive security abstraction named flowwall which allows them to specify easy-to-use policies for controlling sensitive sensor data flows within their smart homes. We have built and evaluated a PatrIoT prototype. Most of the participants in a field study considered PatrIoT to be easy to use, and the supported policies to be useful in protecting their privacy.