Over the last couple of years smart home products, such as lights, doorbell cameras and robot vacuums, have changed from a luxury product to being widely available. Prices went down, usage went up, and our lives got much easier with these new tools. Smart products are more often than not connected to the internet, either via Wi-Fi, an app or a hub. When connected to a hub, which is a small box collecting and sending signals, they may talk over some sort of protocol like Zigbee, Matter or even Bluetooth. Most of the time, this hub has internet access via Wi-Fi. When all these devices are connected together (regardless of which protocol they use) we call it the "Internet of Things" or IoT.
Now at European Made we love smart products. I like that I can turn off the lights in my bedroom from the comfort of my bed, and I love that I can keep an eye on my 3d printer via a smart camera. However (there is always a but, isn't there?) a lot of these smart solutions have a major disadvantage; they leave the digital door to your house wide open! Smart home products can do this in several ways. Let's explore a few of them.
- Permissions: Many products use an internet connection so you can see what's happening in your home at any given moment. That is great, but when installing the product, you often have to consent to sending your data to remote servers. Obviously, one would hope those servers are secure, but not all of them are. What's worse is that some apps ask for permission to use your phone's microphone, address book, location data etc. etc. The app may need this information, but often there's asked for more permissions than there are needed.
- Default credentials: This is when a product come with the same username and password and don't require you to change those upon installing the product. I don't even think I need to explain this one; it's just bad news when anyone can log into your account or product.
- Network safety: There are numerous ways in which smart devices can compromise your network safety. Firstly; when they are in your home network, they can connect to other computers and phones in your network. That may not be the best of ideas unless you have a really good idea what it is they are communicating. Secondly, they might be able to open gates in your router via UPnP, and leave your network open to outside attackers.
- Proximity: When being close enough, some signals may be hijacked or jammed by someone in the area. If your security camera is connected physically (with a cable) to your router, someone may disconnect the cable and plugin another device to gain access to your network.
This is just a selection of things that could potentially go wrong, and it's enough to paint a picture. You might start to wonder if it's safe to use smart products at all? Well rest assured; with the right safety measures you can. All you need is Home Assistant, which is free, open source software, and a device to run it from. This can be something like a Raspberry Pi mini computer, a NAS (network attached storage) or a PC. One thing to pay attention too, to keep this solution running 24 hours a day the device you run it from will need to be powered on the entire time. A personal computer may not be the best solution for that, but you can definitely use it for a test run on there.
What makes home assistant so safe? Well, firstly, you run it from within your network. This helps you to keep your data close and prevents unwanted leakage of your information to companies or hackers. The second big advantage is that you can ditch most apps for smart products, which is great with the peculiar permissions some of them ask for. The last advantage is that you can tailor Home Assistant to your needs and leave out all unnecessary bells and whistles.
Installing Home Assistant may sound intimidating. Especially when you've never heard of things like Raspberry Pi, Internet of Things or a Zigbee protocol. However, the Home Assistant website has excellent guides and an enthusiastic, helpful community to guide you through it. It's definitely worth to give it a try, and you might learn a thing of computers and networks along the way!