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"Smart Houses" that let you turn on lights, etc. from a distance
Smart homes will be in our future, and present. Proprietary technology, and weak security in many devices are concerns. My home has over 100 devices, most voice controlled, run by Homeseer software on a Raspberry Pi 3. Security a concern, yes. Security stopping deployment, no. Most users don't care, but will eventually get stuck with incompatible technologies, even IFTTT doesn't solve everything.
I'm with you there. Kind of worried that either my house will be hacked into (hah), or that my house will develop an AI and lock me in. I think I saw a movie about that when I was a kid. -_-
I work in tech, too, so I see how easily people can get access to a customer's server or site. Makes me a little nervous, but am I just being paranoid?
-T.
Not at all - what if you have a kid like this in your neighborhood and you did something to tick him off?
Seriously, if the savings from the so called green / smart innovations would be returned directly to the user it would be worth it, BUT, from what I've read there is no significant savings AND the utility companies as a monopoly will still 'determine' their 'profit margin' by increasing rates. So, until all the great innovations touted as cost savings to the homeowner have a direct tie back to the user it is all blather and PR on part of the companies to get forced migration to new products / services to sell.
Simply designing highly durable mule like versions of the most common appliances with long life cycles would be more beneficial, but that doesn't fit the consumption based economic system with ever decreasing life cycles of planned obsolescence and forced migration to legislated new technologies under the auspices of 'saving the world'.
I do see the benefit of certain types of smart controls managing the HVAC during non occupied times of a residence, lighting security type capabilities, and some other 'convenience' based applications which would be helpful as the population ages.
As noted in the article, to hack the Nest there needs to be physical access to the device. That is a highly unlikely scenario for the average homeowner. More likely in a movie script.
The linked article says that they were not successful via WiFi. To do their hack, they had to get direct physical access to the device.
If you want to be paranoid about WiFi, check out the Insteon and Z-Wave remotely controllable thermostats which do not themselves have any direct Internet connectivity. Some of these allow you to use a Linux host of your own or a Mac or PC as the relay between the smart devices and the internet, so your Internet-connected computer can be under your control and you can keep it patched and firewalled.
Even this example requires physical access to the device. The hack was not done over the internet. In order for it to happen, the end user needs to download a malicious app to it.
Ransoming a thermostat seems a bit far fetched. For the ransom, you can just get a new one.
Smart houses get you robbed/killed... if you're a prime-time TV fictional character. They rest of us are safe.
Not all smart-home-automation products are created equal. Some don't have direct internet access at all, only a few are remotely "hackable", and 99.9% of the hacks you hear about are proof of concept ideas that have only ever been used by the researcher as a way to get invited to talk at conferences.
Yes, some devices try to use the uPnP features of home internet routers to expose themselves to the Internet, but this is a small subset of the home automation products on the market. Don't buy these things! (and turn off uPnP on your router).
Most of the cheaper products are designed to be "cloud tethered"; they phone home to a central server (Nest, Alexa, Homekit, etc) and this server in the cloud relays all commands back to the device or an in-home "hub" device. These aren't listening for incoming internet requests directly to the device, so the only attack surface for a hacker would be the cloud server -- they won't hack your personal Nest thermostat over the Internet, they'll hack api.nest.com.
There have been quite a few TV shows where the people with all this automation have been hacked into and either killed or robbed.
Gotta wonder whose agenda it serves to have fictional TV shows depicting people getting killed or robbed because they have smart house technology, yet not one single real-life instance where this has occurred?
Look at the 300K customers of Simpli Safe -- researchers discovered multiple low-level security flaws in Simpli Safe, but there's no record of the flaws being exploited by criminals -- it's easier to kick in a door and run away with a TV than it is to obtain a device to record or jam signals in order to gain entry to the one house on the block that has Simpli Safe.
There have been quite a few TV shows where the people with all this automation have been hacked into and either killed or robbed.
No one is going to hack my early warning system (chocolate lab) or my Glock 23.
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Most of these IoT hacks require plugging into the device, or at least knowing the WiFi password.
Smart houses get you robbed/killed... if you're a prime-time TV fictional character. They rest of us are safe.
