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Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications

21 points by MrQuincle 10y ago

Loic 10y ago
When you are building a home, you are not building it for the next two years, you are building it for the next 20 to 25 years. You need to think about the availability of your "SmartHome" appliance/system in 20 years. This is why you should use a standard based system at the hardware level which can have a gateway (with an open source option and open protocols) to a kind of "interaction system" (voice, tablet, whatever). The interaction system can change faster (for 10 years we did not had tablets) but you can still address the hardware built in the house. After hours of research, the only option at the moment is KNX with 100's of suppliers of hardware and many "interaction systems" both pure hardware (switch) and software. Software is both open and closed source. From the security point of view, you can have the complete home automation system disconnected from the internet/local network and have it to work only with hardwired panels/switches. [0]: https://knx.org/ https://knx.org/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
knightofmars 10y ago
If the owner installs malicious malware they're doing the exact same thing that happens when an employee clicks on an email containing a malicious attachment. Which amounts to social engineering and having informed users. I want to be clear, this isn't an argument against better privilege management. It is pointing out that the symptom is what is being exploited in this and many other security scenarios of this nature. For example, I recently was going to install a major department store's application on my phone to access some specific account features. The application wanted access to nearly _everything_ on my phone. I cancelled the installation and wrote an angry letter to the company. But the reality is that most people would just click "OK" and start using the application without ever thinking twice. In the situation described better privilege management does nothing because the user wouldn't use it correctly. (Another real world example is the "Brightest Flashlight" Android application that was collecting data and sharing it with advertisers.) We can go on being paranoid about these types of "attacks" but the reality is we need to have 1. better informed users and 2. software lifecycle processes and distribution mechanisms that don't allow attacks of this nature to make it into the wild (which I believe ST does)

21 points by MrQuincle 10y ago

Loic 10y ago

When you are building a home, you are not building it for the next two years, you are building it for the next 20 to 25 years. You need to think about the availability of your "SmartHome" appliance/system in 20 years. This is why you should use a standard based system at the hardware level which can have a gateway (with an open source option and open protocols) to a kind of "interaction system" (voice, tablet, whatever). The interaction system can change faster (for 10 years we did not had tablets) but you can still address the hardware built in the house. After hours of research, the only option at the moment is KNX with 100's of suppliers of hardware and many "interaction systems" both pure hardware (switch) and software. Software is both open and closed source. From the security point of view, you can have the complete home automation system disconnected from the internet/local network and have it to work only with hardwired panels/switches. [0]: https://knx.org/ https://knx.org/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

knightofmars 10y ago

If the owner installs malicious malware they're doing the exact same thing that happens when an employee clicks on an email containing a malicious attachment. Which amounts to social engineering and having informed users. I want to be clear, this isn't an argument against better privilege management. It is pointing out that the symptom is what is being exploited in this and many other security scenarios of this nature. For example, I recently was going to install a major department store's application on my phone to access some specific account features. The application wanted access to nearly _everything_ on my phone. I cancelled the installation and wrote an angry letter to the company. But the reality is that most people would just click "OK" and start using the application without ever thinking twice. In the situation described better privilege management does nothing because the user wouldn't use it correctly. (Another real world example is the "Brightest Flashlight" Android application that was collecting data and sharing it with advertisers.) We can go on being paranoid about these types of "attacks" but the reality is we need to have 1. better informed users and 2. software lifecycle processes and distribution mechanisms that don't allow attacks of this nature to make it into the wild (which I believe ST does)