Canopy: A Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Token Ring based Communication Protocol for Smart Homes

Abstract: This paper focuses on the new privacy challenges that arise in smart homes. Specifically, the paper focuses on inferring the user's activities -- which may, in turn, lead to the user's privacy -- via inferences through device activities and network traffic analysis. We develop techniques that are based on a cryptographically secure token circulation in a ring network consisting of smart home devices to prevent inferences from device activities, via device workflow, i.e., inferences from a coordinated sequence of devices' actuation. The solution hides the device activity and corresponding channel activities, and thus, preserve the individual's activities. We also extend our solution to deal with a large number of devices and devices that produce large-sized data by implementing parallel rings. Our experiments also evaluate the performance in terms of communication overheads of the proposed approach and the obtained privacy.