Privacy-preserving data infrastructure for smart home appliances based on the Octopus DHT

Abstract

Smart homes are about to become reality, involving technology such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), which enables querying for extended product information from the manufacturer or from public databases. However, every query for information issued from a smart home could adversely affect the privacy of its inhabitants. Since every Electronic Product Code assigned to RFID-equipped objects is unique, it is easily possible to create detailed and long-term customer profiles by linking queries on particular items to a specific person. In order to address the privacy problem, this paper proposes a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure for organized sharing and private querying of data, which is formed by many smart devices across several homes. The efficiency of this approach is examined with experiments involving several hundred nodes. Furthermore, larger peer-to-peer networks of smart home appliances are simulated. According to our evaluation, the proposed solution is able to satisfy real-time requirements in settings where smart devices are geographically close. Moreover, the architecture can be used to store information of nearly one million different products within a network of one thousand nodes, which is a reasonable size for a local collaborative infrastructure between smart homes in towns or cities. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.