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Hacking Internet Connected Light Bulbs
An anonymous reader writes We've been calling it for years — connect everything in your house to the internet, and people will find a way to attack it. This post provides a technical walkthrough of how internet-connected lighting systems are vulnerable to outside attacks. Quoting: "With the Contiki installed Raven network interface we were in a position to monitor and inject network traffic into the LIFX mesh network. The protocol observed appeared to be, in the most part, unencrypted. This allowed us to easily dissect the protocol, craft messages to control the light bulbs and replay arbitrary packet payloads. ... Monitoring packets captured from the mesh network whilst adding new bulbs, we were able to identify the specific packets in which the WiFi network credentials were shared among the bulbs. The on-boarding process consists of the master bulb broadcasting for new bulbs on the network. A new bulb responds to the master and then requests the WiFi details to be transferred. The master bulb then broadcasts the WiFi details, encrypted, across the mesh network. The new bulb is then added to the list of available bulbs in the LIFX smart phone application."
(disclosure: I own LIFX lightbulbs, and wrote an app that controls them)
"Smart-home" stuff is, currently, mostly toys - you have them for doing stuff that you largely don't need to do.
Some Smart-home stuff is able to go beyond the toy-stage, like intelligent control of heating, remote monitoring etc, where they can serve specific, valuable purposes.
Intelligent lightbulbs? Mine are able to entertain the kids for 20 minutes (let them go amok with the app), while I worked on making my phone advice me of SMSes and emails via a brief colour-change to a bulb; this is still in the toys-stage, but slowly starts serving a purpose.
So, in view of you stating it is overkill, I'd ask whether saving on your heating bill is overkill, or whether having fun with setting lighting-levels and -colours is overkill? :)
Naturally, the answer depends on your values in life
Note: My latest suggestion for use of Smart-home equipment was to mix a LIFX lightbulb with a Doorbot (doorbell with camera and wifi), to alert a deaf person of the doorbell being used, by sending visual cues via the lightbulbs (specific colour-change).
(disclosure: I own LIFX lightbulbs, and wrote an app that controls them)
"Smart-home" stuff is, currently, mostly toys - you have them for doing stuff that you largely don't need to do.
Some Smart-home stuff is able to go beyond the toy-stage, like intelligent control of heating, remote monitoring etc, where they can serve specific, valuable purposes.
As for "intelligent" lightbulbs? Mine are able to entertain the kids for 20 minutes (let them go amok with the app), while I worked on making my phone advice me of SMSes and emails via a brief colour-change to a bulb; this is still in the toys-stage, but slowly starts serving a purpose.
So, in view of you stating it is overkill, I'd ask whether saving on your heating bill is overkill, or whether having fun with setting lighting-levels and -colours is overkill? :)
Naturally, the answer depends on your values in life
Note: My latest suggestion for use of Smart-home equipment was to mix a LIFX lightbulb with a Doorbot (doorbell with camera and wifi), to alert a deaf person of the doorbell being used, by sending visual cues via the lightbulbs (specific colour-change).
That's the whole point of TFA. A lightbulb will hand out the WiFi credentials to anything impersonating another lightbulb.
No need to crack WPA, just hop into the mesh network, announce that you're a lightbulb, and the keys are handed to you.
So, your lights, thermostat, lawn-watering controller, swimming pool monitor, and eventually your TV and your refrigerator become attack surfaces that roll over just by looking at them and saying "please".
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
#1 - You're not that interesting.
#2 - Connected devices can have interesting power management solutions. It's not just adjusting the home temperature when it figures out no one's going to be home for 8 hours. What about adjusting when the fridge uses the most power during times when electricity is the cheapest? Or sending you a text message if the motion detectors go off but your car is not in the driveway/garage? Or have lights go on just after dusk (regardless of time of year) and go out at a random time between 10 and 11pm (unless motion suggests people are home)?
The upfront cost of these devices are a bit more. To be absorbed by early adopters, of course. But when the prices come down and the kinks straightened out, they can be quite useful.
OnTopic: My neighbor showed me the app he had on his phone to monitor his pool. It allowed him to monitor temperature, pH, turn the filter and heater on, etc. The installer gave it a default 4 digit passcode, which was apparently the same four digit passcode that every other installation had. Since the ID number of the pool was adjustable, my neighbor joked that he would sometimes log into random people's pools and flash their pool lights (and had others do it to him as well). Fortunately no one's raised the pool temperature to 90 degrees or something like that (yet).
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