HACKER Q&A
📣 soco

Is your home automation secure?


One reads a lot about home automation related (or IoT, for that matter) security incidents, yet there's at the same time a big market for these products. It doesn't look it is only for die-hard enthusiasts, seeing many beginner's guides obviously addressed to non-technical users. Statistics are misleading anyway - they list like 69% of US homes having at least one smart home device, although my home (not in the US) has every one of them carefully disabled. I'm really curious to know from somebody who "automated" their home, what are their thoughts about security? That it won't happen to them? That the drawbacks or possible losses are minimal? Or they put special measures in place to make sure it won't happen? Are certain brands more trustworthy or more upgradable than others? Thank you!


  👤 viciouslyunkind Accepted Answer ✓
Not a fan of smart home appliances, to be fair, particularly because there's no way to ensure privacy of data and security. There was a paper presented at the Taipei Web Conference 2020 earlier in spring, which looked at the ease of compromising privacy and 2 types of identities simultaneously in multi-modal IoT environments, and that has over 70% de-anonymization success. Basically, majority of IoT devices for your home are linked to multi-modal environments. All details are here, if I remember correctly, including the Gibhub link: https://thehackernews.com/2020/04/deanonymize-device-biometr...

As I know of, there's only one company which made progress on security in IoT devices, it's called Teserakt E4. A quick tl;dr on what they offer / propose: - Integrated implant in servers of IoT manufacturers. - Complex end-to-end encryption for devices and different data flows. - Open-source code (soon available).

Bottom line: Won't see it anytime soon.