A survey on blockchain, SDN and NFV for the smart-home security

Due to millions of loosely coupled devices, the smart-home security is gaining the attention of industry professionals, attackers, and academic researchers. The smart home is a typical home where many sensors, actuators, and IoT devices are used to automate home users’ daily activities. Although a smart home provides comfort, safety, and satisfaction to users, it opens up multiple challenging security issues when automating and offering intelligent services. Recent studies have investigated not only blockchain but SDN and NFV to address these challenges. We present a comprehensive survey on blockchain, SDN, and NFV for smart-home security. The paper also proposes a new architecture of the smart-home security. First, we describe the features of the smart home and its current security issues. Next, we outline the characteristics of blockchain, SDN, and NFV, including their contribution to improving the smart-home security. While SDN enhances the management and access control of the home network by providing a programmable controller to home nodes, NFV implements the functions of network appliances (e.g., network monitoring, firewall) as virtual machines and ensures the high availability of the network. Blockchain reinforces IoT data’s privacy, integrity, and security and improves the trust in transactions among untrusted IoT devices. Finally, we discuss open issues and challenges in the field and propose recommendations towards high-level security for the smart home.