Smart homes sound good in concept and I’d love to have one if there weren’t so many risks. But an entire home that can be controlled via computers just sounds like an opsec nightmare. Obviously there’s the plus that your average technologically illiterate granny isn’t going to be using these so it will most likely have strong security systems. But hackers love a challenge.

And a whole neighborhood? A systemwide attack could happen disrupting entire swaths of a city’s residential zone. Imagine showers suddenly spraying boiling water, targeted attacks on epileptic individuals with flashing lights, temperatures dropping to below freezing or up to dangerous levels of heat or lightbulbs overloading sending broken glass everywhere, speakers bursting eardrums.

Not to mention more subtle dangers of such voice activation systems being accessed by malicious actors, or more likely, corporate concerns. Someone gangstalked or targeted by powerful people who could just court order one of these smart home companies to hand over the data and they probably will without fuss.

The attack surface of a single electronic device is massive, with dozens of different apps and services, each with different system vulnerabilities to exploit that’s already hard enough. But just imagine the attack surface of an entire home! Everything from the LG Flatscreen in your living room, to the temperature control systems, to your Apple Smart Toaster can be hacked to gain access to the rest of the system. If any one of those isn’t completely secure (which of course is a pipe dream) then it could be the gateway to a smart home hacking story on a Defcon panel.

And finally, what’s stopping the company from just updating the software for your smart home and paylocking features like “Uh yeah, you need to pay 12.99$ a month to have your cctv cameras work.” And because all the framework that runs the systems is being hosted in proprietary servers, you can’t do shit. And you can’t host your own servers either. Does this sound familiar because it should?

I’ve been using Home Assistant for a while now. I do recommend setting up a VLAN that can’t communicate with the internet which is where any wifi devices live. However I really like ZigBee and/or Z-Wave devices as they don’t require any internet connection.

Lights alone are a game changer. Timers never really worked well for us because we’re pretty far north of the equator and sunrises/sunsets have a pretty big swing. I currently have the lights come on 1 hour before sunset so it adjusts to this swing without me having to do anything. Then I have a button on my nightstand that turns off all the lights that aren’t night lights.

The downsides are that it can be expensive. You start with a couple of light bulbs, maybe a couple of outlets, next thing you know you are pricing out how much it will cost to change all your switches and trying to figure out if they all have neutral wires or not. You’ll start watching youtube videos of people’s setups and looking for ways to do more with your smart home. It’s a fun hobby but can be a lot of work.

Smart homes in centralized hands, such as Google? Nightmare.

Smart homes controled from your home, like home assistant? Awesome. I have home assistant and done some lights, water sensor, even my security cameras. It’s a lot of work, but it works so well it’s crazy.

Just remember, the S in IOT stands for security.

I do have some IOT devices on my network, however they are kept off the internet and on their own vlan. No phoning home (or anywhere else) for these devices.

They can be great if they are set up properly, but too many people just take them out of the box, toss them on their network and think they are just fine.

As others have said, you can sequester IoT devices to a VLAN that has no internet access. Most of the common devices (lights, switches, sensors) added to smart homes work perfectly fine without access to the internet. Voice assistants are the biggest security/privacy hole since all commercial options are from big tech companies and phone home constantly. If you set up a local homeassistant instance you can get a ton of functionality out of smart devices with no direct connection to the internet. You need to decide how you handle accessing homeassistant from outside your home if that’s something you want but there are plenty of options to choose from for that.

One thing I will say that I refuse to add to my home is any kind of smart locks. No matter how much I trust my security setup, I don’t trust it with the ability to unlock my doors. If there was one that could only lock them electronically but required being manually unlocked, them maybe. But I haven’t seen a lock like that out there.

You can connect devices locally now. Eg. Zigbee/Z-wave network protocol without the need to use the internet. I know some builders started to implement smart devices for Apartments in the city which is easy to set the standards but for individual homes, would be harder to sell as it’s costly…

If you’re smart about it, doing home automation can be really rewarding and useful. Automating lights to turn on when it gets dark is probably the most useful thing. I also have a window fan to bring in cool night air, which automatically clicks off at 60°. All of this runs locally on a raspberry pi via home assistant and z-wave, no sus devices on my network!

Smarthome well done is good and I think it will be necessary to tackle some challenges of the future - we need smart solutions to use ressources much more efficiently.

But: 85% of all smart home products are neither smart nor good. They are glorified remote controls. Nothing more.

AMAZON ALEXA IS NOT A SMART HOME PRODUCT.

A smart house doesn’t need you to use your phone/voice/etc. to turn down the blinds or switch on a light. It knows when the blinds need to be where depending on your location, the weather (blind based cooling in summer, heating in winter), the time, etc. It inherently doesn’t need a internet connection to control itself - it only does need the internet to expand its knowledge of the outside world,e.g. by getting disaster alerts, weather forecasts or off-site-location. When done this way there isn’t much “hacking” that can be done. There aren’t many components that can turn into botnets.

This is all possible for ages and it is all easily achieved - KNX and other systems are good examples. Matter can possibly achieve that. But currently it’s the big hype to call everything that can be voice controlled smart.

For fucks sake. It takes me longer to say “Alexa turn on the living room lights” than to do it myself or use a Clapping sensor from the 80ies.

I’ve been using smarthome stuff for quite a while now, and my conclusion is this:

• You absolutely have to stay local. Home Assistant is the only software I know that can pull that off at the moment, but never ever use commercial devices that have to talk to their servers. Once the servers are down or your internet connection is down, those devices are just bricks, and you don’t want that at home.
• The setup is only really usable by the person who set it up. If you’re living alone that’s fine, but anybody else will have a hard time tapping in your secret code to turn on the lights. All trained behavior like pushing a light switch to turn the lights on and off are violated in a smart home, even if it’s just because the delay between pushing the button and the lights going on is increased by 100ms.
• You have to monitor battery levels of sensors and replace them to keep the system working. There are dozens of coin cells in your home, they are going to run out eventually (after a few months).
• Have a fallback mechanism when the network goes down. It’s not great when you can’t turn on the lights to check why the WiFi router isn’t responding.

I really like this statement I heard recently, which I think came from the YouTube Adventurous Way - “Dumb Control, Smart Monitoring”. Make sure that any devices you install have failure models that make sense - you should still be able to control your appliances when the network is down.

That said, the option to remotely control lights, etc is fantastic. I also recommend setting up some temperature sensors in various places - I have quite a few ESP33 boards scattered around with sensors (and and one with an IR blaster) attached.

Buddy of mine moved into a new apartment and they have a couple of “smart features”: Temp, blinds, lights. No cameras (except the front door) or other fancy stuff.

However the apartment can be reached from any browser with a hash. So if you know the hash, you can easily access his apartment controls. No password, 2FA or anything necessary to identify him.

When he told me I was looking at him with wide eyes and he just laughed and said “Yeah, I know.”.

The rate at which the go obsolete is my issue. If you invest in a system, just be prepared to replace everything every five years, and there is almost nothing yoiu can ‘fix’…it is all disposable.

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I have a smart home. I run Unraid OS on my server and among a ton of dockers, I run my own VM with home assistant. Been doing my own DNS, network wide ad blocking, media server, home automation stuff for years now. Always will to help answer any questions.

I’m also disabled so the smart home really helps me.

I’ve been using homeassistant since the start of the year and I’m never going back! Took a while to get the hang of it but being able to make my own smart electronics on the cheap is bloody awesome. Soldered my plug-in cannabis vape to an ESP32 microcontroller and now I can control its temperature from my phone!

None of my smart-home stuff is closed source which helps a lot with trust, and I’ve even tested it to ensure that everything works even if my flat’s internet goes down! Having all my light bulbs running the FOSS WLED firmware also means that I can hook them up to my HyperHDR setup so all the lighting in my room changes colour to match my TV.