PCSS: Privacy Preserving Communication Scheme for SDN Enabled Smart Homes

Smart home technology, also known as home automation system, allows the homeowner and residents to control and monitor the smart devices like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), refrigerators, doors, cameras etc. These features facilitate the users by providing a safe and well-suited environment. However, at the same time these connected devices could be exploited by cybercriminals due to overlooked inbuilt security and privacy concerns of these devices. Because of no authentication and plain text data transmission, intruders can get user profiles, learn user behavior, and can even inject malwares in an unauthenticated devices. Therefore, authentication and privacy preserving user queries remain the key issues in wide adaptation of such technologies. Because of the above mentioned problems, the traditional security solutions cannot be deployed in the low processing devices. Therefore, to overcome the security issues of these low processing gadgets, a network level, lightweight cryptographic security mechanisms are necessitated where the processing is done at the network level middle box rather than low resources end devices. In this aspect, the evolving networking paradigm Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers such properties like programmability, agility, centralized management, and vendor neutrality that overcome the conventional networking control, management, and security problems. The controller of SDN at the control layer manages all the computation and complexities at the network level, rather than at the smart devices. Therefore, in this research, we present a privacy preserving communication scheme for SDN-enabled smart homes (PCSS), which aims at provisioning user and smart device authentication, privacy for data (rest and transit), and user queries. It hinders the learning and modification of data by an intruder during the transmission and features mutual authentication of user, controller, and smart device. PCSS, also offers privacy preserving user queries for the smart homes. This is achieved by proposing a symmetric key based lightweight authentication and searchable encrypted queries protocol. We further highlighted that the experimental results show the efficacy and usefulness of PCSS scheme as compared with the existing secure smart home/system protocols.