Permissioning and Personal Data Management in Alternate-Tenancy Smart Environments

We focus on a scenario that we call SmartBnB: smart homes rich in devices that are rented for a short period of time such as holidays. Such frequent rotation of different users raises two types of mutually dependent challenges. First, we have a permissioning challenge since devices are commonly designed with a single user in mind; yet, given our shared scenario, we need to grant the necessary, yet minimum, access to devices and just for the duration of the stay. Secondly, privacy challenges arise given the shared and externally managed nature of the devices (e.g., on the cloud). Other challenges exist such as the lack of user-interfaces that make difficult to serve a privacy notice. This paper discusses how such a familiar scenario can bring stringent requirements. After characterising and discussing the emergent challenges, we present a conservative and bottom-up architecture (e.g., by reusing existing protocols) that we evaluate on a realistic scenario. We conclude that, while it is able to meet current functional requirements, a SmartBnB scenario raises technical gaps.