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Privacy and Security: the nightmare of the smart home.

The connected home, a dream, but a nightmare for your privacy. Almost everything in your home is as likely to be hacked: your screens, your cameras, your smart meter, your fridge … and even your bathroom!

You’ve probably heard of the “smart home”? Basically, it is a house full of sensors, detecting the ambient temperature or the presence of a person, and regulates itself in energy consumption.

The “house of the future” ultimate in home automation, you should also protect more effectively with its cameras, and increase your comfort by allowing you eg to surf the Internet from any room, through any object. In short, a smart house is a “connected” with the Internet of Things.

All this is fine, but as all things “connected” your “smart home” can easily be hacked. And this is where it gets cold in the back: a hacker will be able to lock or unlock the doors to your house and watch you through your cameras. It may even … open and close the toilet lid (smart, too)!

Home who sees all

Good for WC, it’s a joke, even if it is possible. But for the rest, this is very serious. At Black Hat Forum held this summer in Las Vegas, Dan Crowley, security researcher company Trustwave presented the risks of smart home.

In the foreground, he showed how, in a few minutes, he could hack and change the PIN code lock a “smart home” to close or open the doors to the knowledge of the owner. Using surveillance cameras and motion detectors of the smart home, and controlling alarm systems, an attacker would be able to prepare meticulously burglary, or worse.

According to Dan Crowley, the advantage of a connected home, namely control everything remotely via a smartphone, tablet or PC is not without risk to personal safety and privacy.

Thus, according to the researcher, the servers which pass communications between your home and your external devices are far from secure. An attacker would be able to “watch people” a house with cameras and microphones connected devices, even “harm them.”

“The biggest risk is that a flaw can give you access to hundreds of thousands of homes at once,” said Dan Crowley. “In this case, someone could easily make a real crime wave,” he adds.

And not necessarily need to go that far to terrorize someone, just take control of the lights in the house and play with, as if the house was “haunted” …

“A wealth of data”
As explained ReadWrite site, “your smart home” is a “data mine”. I already wrote a post about the risks of “smart meters” (“smart meters”) – this is in the same vein.

“The information that is available in a smart home can be really extraordinary detail,” explains Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Thus, besides the fact that an attacker may know the contents of your fridge (too clever) analysis of energy consumption of a household can “reveal details about the habits of the family, their jobs time “… and help out when you’re not home.

“The pirates set aside” is the risk of being monitored by the police or the authorities. “If the police suspect me of being a drug lord, will they access the images from my cameras?” Asks ReadWrite. For security reasons, we could also be tracked … in our own home.

No matter falling into paranoia, of course, companies that sell items online for your future home are working seriously to ensure security. But beware, just do not use these things blindly.