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Does Home Assistant let you make all IOT devices safer? For example, I imagine the business plan for products like Hue involves selling information to data brok

by rz2k 8y ago

Does Home Assistant let you make all IOT devices safer? For example, I imagine the business plan for products like Hue involves selling information to data brokers, but after glancing at the Hue section[1], I couldn't quickly tell whether you are still publishing information about your home environment. [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/components/hue/ https://www.home-assistant.io/components/hue/

flyingcircus3 8y ago
The Hue does not rely on HA for network connectivity. The Hue hub connects to wifi, and you talk to it over the network. I don't believe HA is doing anything other than reading/writing the state of the bulbs.
- gerdesj 8y ago
  Hue and company use Zigbee - you can ditch the hub: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee2mqtt-getting-rid-of-your-proprietary-zigbee-bridges-xiaomi-hue-tradfri/52108 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee2mqtt-getting-ri... (I can personally vouch for Scott Darby's ability to put together a device for UK users - see comment 162. I've got one of his)
  - OJFord 8y ago
    > see comment 162 Well, I learned something about HN today!
ce4 8y ago
Probably not, if they use wifi these devices can phone home or even worse - act as an insecure bridge into your network [0] or accept commands from the cloud that anyone can inject. [0]: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/43486.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/43486.html
- rovr138 8y ago
  If you’re able to talk to them via LAN they might not require internet. If so, you can block their outgoing connections.
  - gh02t 8y ago
    Hue has a local API, you can firewall them if you want and HA will still be able to talk to them over the LAN. You can also get a Zigbee dongle and control the bulbs directly if you want, Hue bulbs are Zigbee compliant.
gerdesj 8y ago
Does Home Assistant let you make all IOT devices safer? Yes, for a given value of yes! For starters, you need to ditch all those hubs and apps and that means you need to look into Z Wave and Zigbee. Briefly and in my experience and testing, Z Wave devices are more expensive but more compatible with each other. Z Wave has a longer range without any relays. Both are very well supported but I think Z Wave is better supported. Philips Hue is Zigbee as is Tradfri (Ikea). I've got both USB dongles plugged into a VMWare esxi in a VMware cluster at work and both survive vMotion and are very stable. I'm using this for Z Wave: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YETCNOE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YETCNOE/ref=oh_aui_de... (£43) and people on the forums offer to make up Zigbee USB devices with ready flashed firmware for about £20 or you can buy your own bits from Alibaba and DIY for a bit more for one but a lot less for more than say five. You should also investigate the MQTT protocol and consider say Mosquitto and proper SSL for it for external stuff like Owntracks. Internal only access can be satisfied by using the built in MQTT broker in Home Assistant. Also, consider ESP8266 (or ESP32) devices. You can get two for £8 on Amazon with pins etc already to slap in a small breadboard. Note that you can power them using PoE and a PoE to USB converter to get them up to 100m away. You can fit these things inside the sort of wall mount box you might have for a light switch or ethernet ports. When I've finished testing at work (!) I'll be looking to control my underfloor heating, lights (note that you need three wires (live, neutral, switched neutral) for switch box controls or something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fibaro-FGS-213-Single-Switch-Black/dp/B01KHWI0HK/ref=sr_1_cc_5?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1535059688&sr=1-5-catcorr&keywords=zwave+switch https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fibaro-FGS-213-Single-Switch-Black/... that can go in the light fitting itself. I'm in the UK BTW. Also I'll be putting in window and door open/shut detectors and a fair few of something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0141FQDJQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0141FQDJQ/ref=oh_aui_de... to see what is going on in a room. I aim to defang my Sonos speakers eventually. The TVs already go through Squid with quite a lot of monitoring and a lot of pfSense keeping an eye on things. ZoneMinder is well supported for cameras. Proper home automation is not cheap but is very cool if done right. Do your research very carefully. If you have a SO, then be very, very careful and test, test, test otherwise you will be kicked into touch very quickly. I'm aiming to have manual overrides (switches etc) for nearly everything and will be putting in a lot more wifi and UPS, RAID etc along with proper backups. If you are going to do more than a toy lighting system than do it right. I don't fear my IoT stuff because they live on VLANs with names like THINGS and SEWER (for the really scary ones) but I'm not your average home owner (IT-wise) and am extremely pissed off at the vendors of these things for the frankly cynical approach taken to security and your privacy.

by rz2k 8y ago

flyingcircus3 8y ago

The Hue does not rely on HA for network connectivity. The Hue hub connects to wifi, and you talk to it over the network. I don't believe HA is doing anything other than reading/writing the state of the bulbs.

gerdesj 8y ago
Hue and company use Zigbee - you can ditch the hub: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee2mqtt-getting-rid-of-your-proprietary-zigbee-bridges-xiaomi-hue-tradfri/52108 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee2mqtt-getting-ri... (I can personally vouch for Scott Darby's ability to put together a device for UK users - see comment 162. I've got one of his)
- OJFord 8y ago
  > see comment 162 Well, I learned something about HN today!

ce4 8y ago

Probably not, if they use wifi these devices can phone home or even worse - act as an insecure bridge into your network [0] or accept commands from the cloud that anyone can inject. [0]: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/43486.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/43486.html

rovr138 8y ago
If you’re able to talk to them via LAN they might not require internet. If so, you can block their outgoing connections.
- gh02t 8y ago
  Hue has a local API, you can firewall them if you want and HA will still be able to talk to them over the LAN. You can also get a Zigbee dongle and control the bulbs directly if you want, Hue bulbs are Zigbee compliant.

gerdesj 8y ago

Does Home Assistant let you make all IOT devices safer? Yes, for a given value of yes! For starters, you need to ditch all those hubs and apps and that means you need to look into Z Wave and Zigbee. Briefly and in my experience and testing, Z Wave devices are more expensive but more compatible with each other. Z Wave has a longer range without any relays. Both are very well supported but I think Z Wave is better supported. Philips Hue is Zigbee as is Tradfri (Ikea). I've got both USB dongles plugged into a VMWare esxi in a VMware cluster at work and both survive vMotion and are very stable. I'm using this for Z Wave: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YETCNOE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YETCNOE/ref=oh_aui_de... (£43) and people on the forums offer to make up Zigbee USB devices with ready flashed firmware for about £20 or you can buy your own bits from Alibaba and DIY for a bit more for one but a lot less for more than say five. You should also investigate the MQTT protocol and consider say Mosquitto and proper SSL for it for external stuff like Owntracks. Internal only access can be satisfied by using the built in MQTT broker in Home Assistant. Also, consider ESP8266 (or ESP32) devices. You can get two for £8 on Amazon with pins etc already to slap in a small breadboard. Note that you can power them using PoE and a PoE to USB converter to get them up to 100m away. You can fit these things inside the sort of wall mount box you might have for a light switch or ethernet ports. When I've finished testing at work (!) I'll be looking to control my underfloor heating, lights (note that you need three wires (live, neutral, switched neutral) for switch box controls or something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fibaro-FGS-213-Single-Switch-Black/dp/B01KHWI0HK/ref=sr_1_cc_5?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1535059688&sr=1-5-catcorr&keywords=zwave+switch https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fibaro-FGS-213-Single-Switch-Black/... that can go in the light fitting itself. I'm in the UK BTW. Also I'll be putting in window and door open/shut detectors and a fair few of something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0141FQDJQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0141FQDJQ/ref=oh_aui_de... to see what is going on in a room. I aim to defang my Sonos speakers eventually. The TVs already go through Squid with quite a lot of monitoring and a lot of pfSense keeping an eye on things. ZoneMinder is well supported for cameras. Proper home automation is not cheap but is very cool if done right. Do your research very carefully. If you have a SO, then be very, very careful and test, test, test otherwise you will be kicked into touch very quickly. I'm aiming to have manual overrides (switches etc) for nearly everything and will be putting in a lot more wifi and UPS, RAID etc along with proper backups. If you are going to do more than a toy lighting system than do it right. I don't fear my IoT stuff because they live on VLANs with names like THINGS and SEWER (for the really scary ones) but I'm not your average home owner (IT-wise) and am extremely pissed off at the vendors of these things for the frankly cynical approach taken to security and your privacy.