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."

Comments

Re:Borg Home

[GNious]

(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).

Re:Nonsense

[RealGene]

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".