What do you guys think of the idea of smart homes? I could make a basic setup using https://home-assistant.io to control my home temperature and lighting; the tools for doing this are everywhere nowadays and implementation doesn’t seem too horrific anymore.
But setting aside what I “can” do, is this something that I “should” do? How can a person implement this without connecting any devices to the internet?
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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 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?
To be fair, many of those problems are things you can mitigate by picking the right vendor and staying away from anything that needs to phone home or use the internet
What’s stopping the company from just updating the software
The fact that I buy zwave stuff designed never to connects to the internet
And you can’t host your own servers either
Home Assistant says otherwise
This. I have been slowly building my smart home for the last 4-5 years, and I’ve yet to have a dead piece of equipment outside of a failed plug-in outlet. Since i do run everything through home assistant, there isn’t really any worry on my end up about longer term support, and if something does break in 10 years then whatever, I got 10 years of automation and a fun hobby and I’ll just replace it with the switches and shit that I took out to begin with. But because my house is now built around zigbee and home assistant, the only thing I actually have to worry about is HASS going away.
I mean, sure, I’ll probably upgrade to other things over time anyway, but that is the nature of technology. I mean, I’m sure these articles have been written but this thread is the equivalent of “laptops - computers are already fine, isn’t it just going to be a headache to carry one with you?” Ditto for modern mobile phones.
Yeah, my favorite part is the stability, honestly. I don’t have my HA instance facing the internet in any way, only accessible via my Nebula overlay network. No pressure to update the OS regularly or expect that I’m suddenly going to lose features because some big tech company decided they wanted to paywall or disable it in an update.
The fact that I moved earlier this year and was able to bring my whole smart home setup with me, and have it working at the new house before we even had an Internet connection is just golden.
Okay that’s fair, you bring up good points. I’m actually glad there are counter to my points. Thanks 👍.
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.
Agreed on all points.
I just wanted to add that I’m very glad smart locks exist. My friend with cerebral palsy can now secure his home with a lock and be able to get back in independently.
In general, smart devices are huge for him, and others with physical disabilities.
Also, I should say that I really enjoy the convenience of having Google Assistant in the house. Verbal timers, alarms, reminders, podcasts, and music mostly. Those and the pirate FireTV Stick are our only devices to date. I just don’t care enough to put the legwork in to getting IoT set up. Switches are fine.
That’s great that they help your friend like that! As someone that doesn’t face any kind of accessibility issues myself, it’s easy to overlook those kinds of benefits that these devices can provide. In situations like your friend’s, I’d agree that any potential security cons are outweighed by the pros (especially if the alternative before was having to leave the doors unlocked anyways).
Agree on the convenience of voice assistants. I’ve got various models of Google homes in my house that I use for voice controls on anything I don’t have a good way to truly automate. Different people will have different tolerances for how okay they are with the data things like that can gather. One day I might try to set up one of the local network voice assistants but those can take a lot of work to get just right. Always a tradeoff of convenience and privacy.
Oh that’s interesting. Does Google Home work on an unconnected VLAN for lights? I use it for lights and kitchen timers. I don’t see myself adding anything more complicated or invasive though.
I don’t think Google home would work without an internet connection. I believe google devices and the google home app expect a connection to Google’s servers.
I personally use homeassistant to control everything without an external internet connection and I know you can lock Philips Hue lights off from the internet and the official Hue app will still work.
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.
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…
Your neighbors are a security threat too, not just Internet criminals.
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.
I sorta wonder about these when selling the house to the next person. What if a little old lady buys your house?
I thought I’d remove them if the buyer isn’t interested. They still work like normal light switches without a smart home hub.
Yeah no. As a former IT guy the last thing I want is be tech support for my family’s light switch
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.
I’m super interested in all these projects! Would you mind sharing guides you found helpful when designing and building then?
For HyperHDR I started with this guide along with a bunch of YouTube tutorials and a lot of trial and error given it was my first time soldering and first time using a microcontroller in a project!
With the cannabis vape I basically used the skills I learned making my HyperHDR setup along with a multimeter and the EspHome documentation (and even more trial and error) to emulate the potentiometer that was originally wired to the temperature controller and to control an LED I wired up to it.
Other than the official documentation the main thing that I found super helpful was the official HomeAssistant forums and (unfortunately) Reddit.
Thank you so much for all these details, this will help a ton! I taught myself to solder a few years ago to do custom LEDs in my kitchen and kid’s bedroom, and it was super fun. I’m really excited to try out some of the stuff you did, thanks again!
In theory it’s awesome, but in practice it’s a Black Hat heaven
Harmful, IMO.
Anywhere “smart” objects are, surveillance can also be. I’ve read 1984 enough times to know I don’t want a telescreen on every available surface.
AIRGAP EVERYTHING.
It’s a great and rewarding hobby! But having cloud connected devices on the same network as your sensitive information is an issue.
Use a vLAN and IoT devices capable of local control. Use a self hosted hub like Home Assistant. Keep devices that collect sensitive information (like a camera) out of sensitive areas (like the bedroom). Then you should be reasonably secure.
The only smart objects I have are some light bulbs. I think, some processes are good to automate and put software in control of, and some things I want to have explicit control over (I.E. Door locks, Safe locks, AC settings, Heating). Technology can break in fantastical ways, but a lock should just freaking work.
I think you need to ask yourself a few questions: is why do you want this? What things do you want to accomplish and how do you see them improving your life? Is the benefit that you gain worth the expense in money and time that it will take to set these things up?
One of the things I made ‘smart’ early on was my garage door. I live in an older house with a tuck-under garage and I had woken up one too many times to find someone had left the garage door open all night. I was tired of constantly going up and down the stairs at the end of the night to make sure everything was closed up and I just wanted a simple way to check, and to close (or open) the garage door if necessary. After the garage door I decided to put sensors on all the doors. Now I didn’t have to run around checking all the doors after everybody went to bed, or if I wanted to turn the a/c on. Next came lights in high-traffic areas, the ones that would get left on all night if I didn’t follow behind everyone turning them off.
In creating all of these wonderful automations where lights would come on magically whenever someone would enter a room I created another problem. Eventually, something important will fail, and the system will break down, and suddenly you realize you have an implicit, unspoken SLA with your partner. I had created an entire household that seemingly couldn’t figure out what to do with themselves in a darkened room if a careless Home Assistant update broke the whole thing. You have to set realistic expectations for these things because no matter how reliable your setup is, one day something is going to fail and you’re going to need to troubleshoot why.
I have provided only a handful of examples but each one served a need that I had at the time in a very busy household with small children and not enough hours in a day. For me, I believe the benefit I received was worth the expense and the hassle of automating these things in my home. If I had to do it all over again today I believe the benefit would be even greater - or, at least, the hassle would have been far less - everything is so much easier now especially with what Home Assistant has become.
Ultimately, you are the only one who can decide if the expense and effort are worth it for yourself.
An absolute nightmare for security and privacy. Just say no.
