Spacelord: Private and Secure Smart Space Sharing

Space sharing services like vacation rentals and meeting rooms are being equipped with smart devices such as cameras, door locks and many other sensors. However, the sharing of such devices poses privacy and security problems, as there is typically no clear control transfer between owners and users. In this paper, we propose Spacelord, a system to time-share smart devices contained in a shared space privately and securely while allowing users to configure them. When a user stays at a space, Spacelord ensures that the smart devices contained in it run code and configurations the user trusts while removing pre-installed code and configurations. When the user leaves the space, Spacelord reverts any changes the user has introduced to the smart devices, deletes any remaining private data and lets the owner take back control over the devices. We evaluate Spacelord for two realistic space-sharing cases—smart home and coworking meeting room—and observe smart space provisioning delays of ∼ 82 s across three different platforms. Moreover, the average runtime overhead of our system varies from 7.8% to 11.8% across different hub hardware, running native applications.