Future Spaces: reinventing the home network for better security and automation in the IoT era

The local networking fundamentals at work in our homes have seen very little evolution in the past couple of decades. Yet in recent years, the context in which home networks operate has drastically evolved. While we became more and more dependent on digital services, cyberthreats have multiplied. With the advent of the Internet of Things, the number and diversity of the devices connected to our home networks are exploding. Some of those devices are poorly secured or designed, and put a risk onto users data privacy and security. At the same time, administrating a home network has remained a tedious chore, requiring skills from unsavvy users. We present Future Spaces, an end-to-end hardware-software prototype that provides fine-grained control over Internet of Things devices in the home, enabling easy and secure management of smart environments. Relying on Software Defined Networking-enabled home gateways and virtualization of network functions in the cloud, our solution supports advanced networking security and automation through the definition of isolated, intent-based slices. This disrupts how people and organizations will discover, organize, control and share their and third-party connected assets across multiple domains through intuitive concepts and interfaces, smoothly adapting to various usage contexts