Are Smartphone Apps The Biggest Security Concern For Smart Home Devices?
If you want to understand how good your smart home device’s security is, you just need to look at the companion smartphone apps, according to Brazilian and American academic researchers.
Our intuition is that if this interaction between the companion app and device firmware is not implemented with good security principles, the device’s firmware is potentially insecure and vulnerable to attacks.
Belkin, LIFX, Broadlink, and TP-Link faced this issue while Nest and EZVIZ had good security. If you can, create a second network just for your smart home gadgets. The researchers came to this conclusion after looking at about 32 Android apps that work with 96 smart-home devices. Ten of them don’t use any encryption technology and 6 of them had hard-coded encryption keys.
Good news is that there were a few that used good security standards, such as Nest, which uses its cloud servers as an intermediary so that the app and the device don’t communicate directly.
EZVIZ prints its encryption key with a QR code that is placed within the product box. In order to connect the app to the device, one just has to scan the QR code! While there is more to achieve in the security niche, to see that some companies are doing all they can is gratifying.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com
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