Securing Smart Home Networks with Software-Defined Perimeter

Internet of Things (IoT) allows households to have real-time access to various services through a range of smart-home technologies. These technologies allow owners to reduce expenses for security, heating, cooling, lighting, electricity, and water. In general, using IoT and smart-home technologies enables new sharing and service economy paradigms to unlock the value of surplus resources. This requires a more holistic approach, exploring synergies across and between verticals to maximize efficiencies on a wider scale. Further, there is a demand to optimize the use of existing assets and resources while maintaining the security and privacy of users through exploring new appropriate frameworks. Indeed, Software-Defined Perimeters (SDP) can play a crucial role in security and present an ideal network security framework for smart-home technologies. There are several benefits as a result of adopting SDP in smart-home technologies, such as providing light-weight authentication for devices as well as dynamically updating firewall rules. To this end, the integration between the SDP and smart-home infrastructure is examined through virtualized network testbeds. The testing results prove that SDP can provide reasoning capabilities to repel different attacks on the smart-home infrastructures, such as flooding and spoofing types of attacks, intrusion detection, and eavesdropping activities.