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posted by Fnord666 on Friday October 25 2019, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly

Smart bulbs are expected to be a popular purchase this holiday season. But could lighting your home open up your personal information to hackers?

Earlier this year Amazon's Echo made global headlines when it was reported that consumers' conversations were recorded and heard by thousands of employees.

Now researchers at UTSA have conducted a review of the security holes that exist in popular smart-light brands. According to the analysis, the next prime target could be that smart bulb that shoppers buy this coming holiday season.

"Your smart bulb could come equipped with infrared capabilities, and most users don't know that the invisible wave spectrum can be controlled. You can misuse those lights," said Murtuza Jadliwala, professor and director of the Security, Privacy, Trust and Ethics in Computing Research Lab in UTSA's Department of Computer Science. "Any data can be stolen: texts or images. Anything that is stored in a computer."

Anindya Maiti, Murtuza Jadliwala. Light Ears: Information Leakage via Smart Lights[$]. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2019; 3 (3): 1 DOI: 10.1145/3351256


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 25 2019, @12:59PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 25 2019, @12:59PM (#911614)

    The people that are getting powned are buying vertical silo devices that connect to big brother and nobody else over the internet.

    Anyone who wants something useful has the opposite devices. My hass.io is firewalled off from the internet, has a zwave radio, and I could, if I wanted, buy standard compatible zwave bulbs that can't connect to the internet anyway but can connect to everything connected to my hass.io install, which is a lot of interaction.

    Anyone who's capable of or interested in actually useful applications is already using the COTS FOSS(ish) solution and isn't going to care about replicating a slightly less shitty vertical silo.

    Essentially what we have in home automation here is the old "BBS vs internet access" battle of the 90s being replayed. There's lots of TV commercials and free CDs for AOL, but nobody wants it and the wide open internet is more useful although there's no TV commercials for it. The more useless the commercial product the more likely there's marketing heavily pushing it because its so obviously useless.

    Everybody actually DOING stuff with light bulbs as a UI is already using FOSS and zwave gear, not some internet connected big brother shit they won't have API access to anyway so they couldn't use it if they wanted.

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