We design solutions and implement systems to make IoT systems reliable in high heterogeneity, manageable and programmable at large scale. Students will be mentored by a PhD student to work on one of the projects:

(1) Identity-independent IoT policy server. We build a policy server that focuses on parsing relationships instead of identities and evaluating upcoming requests against policies (e.g., security or energy related policies). We will study policy specifications, implement some new features based on an existing prototype, and evaluate the system using IoT datasets.

(2) Distributed IoT device discovery and authorization. We will explore solutions based on mDNS and capability tokens.

(3) Firewall solutions tailored to IoT. We will go through some quick tutorials to grasp a programming language for programmable networks and build a firewall prototype based on it. The firewall will introduce manufacture-specified profiles and dynamically capture network traffic.

(4) Usability study for IoT device interoperability. We will study new IoT protocols for interoperation between different IoT devices and platforms.