  Most of the existing models for deploying IoT ecosystem involves the vendor
being in the loop of the command and control of IoT devices hence users'
privacy and security is one of the main challenges. Despite these concerns,
users are often faced with a choice between limiting the device functionality
or enabling internet access to the IoT devices by signing up to the vendor
centralized model in order to access their device from outside their home. In
this paper, we argue that although IoT is promising a revolutionary way of
offering services to users, most of these devices shouldn't be allowed to have
Internet access due to the increased risks to privacy and security. We present
an alternative home networking design model which limits the exposure of IoT
devices, and enable seamless access to their functionality from outside the
home using WireGuard (WG), a state-of-the-art Virtual Private Network (VPN)
protocol. We built a test-bed using off-the-shelf IoT devices for testing our
proposed network design under various conditions; including access from Home,
4G, Office and Public Wifi networks. We show that our VPN-based remote access
to the IoT device offers a better performance in terms of end-to-end delay in
all scenarios when using Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) and comparable
performance when using double encryption Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure
(HTTPS) over the VPN.
