SoK: Privacy-enhancing Smart Home Hubs
Igor Zavalyshyn, Axel Legay, Annanda Thavymony Rath, Étienne Rivière
Abstract
Smart homes are IoT systems enabling the automation of household operation. The unrestricted collection and processing of data by smart home systems raises legitimate privacy concerns for their users. Over the past decade, there has been significant interest in privacy-enhancing technologies applied at the level of a local smart hub physically located in the home and acting as a gateway between sensors, applications, platform providers, and services in the cloud. The number and variety of projects and research proposals can, however, make their comparison a daunting and unnecessarily complex task. We systematize existing knowledge in this field through the analysis and categorization of 10 industrial and community-contributed systems and 37 research proposals from the literature of the past 11 years. Our results shed light on the diversity of system and trust models considered in the state-of-the-art and on the associated privacy-enhancing technologies. We further identify open research problems and promising approaches that would benefit the smart home hub model and the protection of smart home users’ privacy.