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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

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Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#91

Post by armagon »

czbond wrote: post #71

Can anyone recommend a method* without Wifi? Isn't there a method for "smart outlets", main scheduler, etc over electrical lines rather than bluetooth, wifi, etc? Method* == standard, or product line. [yes i used pointer and equality symbols oddly] Edit: basically looking for a way to avoid more wireless transmitters in the house. Or are all outlets "receive only"?

The previous generation of smart home devices was called X10, and it used signals over power lines.

I gather it was:

- slow

- might have required you to make a connection in your circuit breaker

- and was designed in the 1970s, when home electrical systems weren't very noisy (apparently all the switching power adapters we have today make a ton of noise and make it hard for the signal).

I don't see why something newer like this couldn't be done -- we have powerline modems, right? Probably not as fast as wifi, but it does go where it is needed and requires physical access to hack.

Some devices are using Zigbee (a different wireless system), but I understand it was developed without security and isn't hard for third-parties to hack into.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#92

Post by jes5199 »

mattferderer wrote: post #62

I hope security is at the top of their list. I want a super secure hub that everything connects to. The hub is the only thing that speaks to my router. The hub is super secure & doesn't let devices send data back to their manufacturer. If I buy cheap devices off a flea market like Amazon, I want to sleep safe & know that the hub is preventing that device from messing with any other devices or accessing the internet.…

Apple, Amazon, and Google are fundamentally opposed to a model that sells devices that don’t phone home - their whole purpose is to capture value by creating lock-in for surveillable hosted services

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#93

Post by AgloeDreams »

m-p-3 wrote: post #63

> The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification. Yet I don't see any mention of making those being able to work comple…

Reading though it seems like a common universal standard that fully removes the need for third party services as all devices will adhere to a common standard. (I"m sure all of these will offer third party apps and all that still) but if you look at something like Homekit smart plugs, you can configure many of them without ever using anything but the Home App, just scan and go. Done right, this standard could make these devices never need third party services, just local networking. Seems like the goal, obviously I agree with you that it should be a stated priority.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#94

Post by jsilence »

czbond wrote: post #71

Can anyone recommend a method* without Wifi? Isn't there a method for "smart outlets", main scheduler, etc over electrical lines rather than bluetooth, wifi, etc? Method* == standard, or product line. [yes i used pointer and equality symbols oddly] Edit: basically looking for a way to avoid more wireless transmitters in the house. Or are all outlets "receive only"?

LoRa (not LoRaWan) could be a Method. Or PJON.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#95

Post by mr__y »

m-p-3 wrote: post #63

> The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification. Yet I don't see any mention of making those being able to work comple…

"Since your recent comment does not meet our Community Standards(tm) your account has been suspended for a period of 28 days*. Additionally you will not be able to turn on the lights during that period and your microwave usage will be limited to 90 seconds daily."

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#96

Post by technofiend »

slantyyz wrote: post #12
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

The reason I can say my smarthome is relatively secure is explicitly because it doesn't use IP. It's good they're trying to standardize, but you're gonna have a problem when you try to use a firewall to inspect what these devices are up to and find that they're all making encrypted tunnels back to their home bases and won't work without them.

I've been gradually retiring my wifi smart devices in favor of Z-wave because I find them far more reliable and much easier to maintain and manage. It's also a little annoying having a pile of wifi devices whose only purpose is to manage an on-off state consume IP addresses on my network.

I share your need to name all my devices in the controller view. Hopefully zwave has better security support than typical IoT devices. I'd really prefer to use certificates rather than WPA passwords because password rotation requires a) I give vendors my passwords which they may not really secure in any way, b) often requires I use a vendor tool to rotate said password.

It would be much preferable to have a standard way to store a certificate to the device. Today when the inevitable happens and someone leaves customer WPA passwords on an open S3 bucket, or they're exposed via cyber security break I have to update every device. It would be so much nicer to just go update my compromised device's certificate rather than the password for everything. Frankly I'd prefer certificates to passwords anyway because sooner or later I'm sure WEP2 itself will be broken.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#97

Post by chasd00 »

mattferderer wrote: post #62

I hope security is at the top of their list. I want a super secure hub that everything connects to. The hub is the only thing that speaks to my router. The hub is super secure & doesn't let devices send data back to their manufacturer. If I buy cheap devices off a flea market like Amazon, I want to sleep safe & know that the hub is preventing that device from messing with any other devices or accessing the internet.…

what do people mean when they say security for smart home devices? if the "launch ICBM" port is open on a device on your LAN doesn't an attacker still have to traverse your router to get to it? Otherwise, an attacker would have to get access to your LAN. Is something like that what you mean?

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#98

Post by aequitas »

teekert wrote: post #79
aequitas wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your device supports opentherm (which is not as open as you might think, btw) you might want to look into OTGW [0]. It probably works with Nest to if the Nest allows to run without internet at all. [0] http://otgw.tclcode.com/

My central heater is a simple on/off model. Nest will work offline with it but afaik you can't write target temperatures to it then.

To bad, my old heater had opentherm, with the OTGW I could intercept the packets between the heater and thermostat, change values (eg: date/time), issue commands (set room temperature) and add missing functionality (outside temperature for heating curve), it was ideal in every way. But I moved and my current heater has a proprietary protocol over rs485 so its a no-go for the OTGW.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#99

Post by wtvanhest »

ludamad wrote: post #83
FussyZeus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming. I genuinely think the Amazon team (at least in that particular regard) want to do some good. But until they can teach their machines how to understand context, I just don't want my unfiltered conversations going around potentially to medical institutions or law enforcement.

Has anyone found Alexa way too easy to trigger? As someone who frequently talks about people with a similar name, I'm amazed at how often Alexa chimes in. I think 'OK Google' is at a sweet spot (although my parents for ages were convinced 'hi google' would work if they tried enough :)

Id say yes. I just switched from google and feel like google was too buggy and slightly too hard to trigger. Alexa is too easy to trigger and has too many notifications.
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