Secure Your Smart Homes In Today’s World Of IoT

Our homes are becoming smart as personal equipment, and the local infrastructure adds connectivity and processing power. These systems are integrated with voice interfaces to create home automation and are connected to the Internet.

Smart home technology promises many other ways to make our home life more convenient, from programmable lighting schedules to automated garage doors. Yet, while ensuring that smart homes keep residents and their data safe, the work required to enable this feature is not being addressed. As we realize that more than 15 years after we started owning smartphones, our online footprint has been amazingly revealing about our lives, actions, desires, and failures.

Given the potential value of data about our home activities, there are plenty of incentives to abuse smart home technology. For example, anyone who monitors network connections made to smart TVs while connected to the Internet will also be familiar with personalizing personal data for commercial gain. Another broad-based approach is to search the Internet for vulnerable Internet of Things (IoT) devices, then incorporate them into botnets that can be used to prevent service attacks for political or economic gain.

The Smart Home Security Challenge

As smart home technology becomes more complex and pervasive, the challenge of securing it increases.

An essential part of IoT security, of which a smart home is a particular case, is device authentication or finding a way to prove that every device on the network is legitimate and not cloned. This concept means giving each device a unique identifier, perfectly placed in the device and cannot be changed or copied. You can use unique identifiers for a series of steps to establish trust between the two devices, enabling their identity verification. For example, it is possible to create a secret shared by the two devices, which is then used to allow secure communication between them.

Another critical aspect of securing smart home devices involves ensuring that the firmware downloads they receive are legal. It involves two steps.

  1. Make sure that any source of firmware updates signs the code it sends so that the smart device can verify that it came from a good start.
  2. Provide a way to confirm that the code did not change during the transfer to the smart device. For example, the update should be denied if the signature is not recognized or the payload has changed during the transition.

Secure connections using encryption systems that feature the device’s unique identifier are critical to protecting data integrity and user privacy in smart home settings.

For example, the voice captured by a voice assistant must be encrypted to secure a journey to the cloud server that provides the voice recognition service. Likewise, video data transmitted from cameras must be encrypted to ensure privacy. Other data collecting and transmitting devices such as thermostats and air quality monitors must also be securely authenticated and encrypted to protect the data integrity you are sending so that it will not be corrupted or misused. Since we use sensors to provide information automated systems use to make decisions about their actions, injecting incorrect information into the sensor data stream can have serious consequences. For example, suppose someone tampered with your thermostat data and showed that the temperature in your home was higher than it was. In that case, it could cause the air conditioner (A / C) to run continuously.

Smart home security measures

Security controller ICs are also called embedded Secure Elements (eSEs). It is designed to provide smart home devices and tools to secure networks.

These integrated circuits provide a level of physical security by handling security functions in a device separated from the central application processor of the smart home device. Each contains secure storage in which arbitrary user data and encryption keys are either generated on the device or programmed into the device when they are created in a secure facility. In addition, the hardware is tamper-resistant, so trying to remove confidential information physically will destroy it.

Such electronic systems can hold secret keys for symmetric encryption schemes, create encrypted critical pairs for asymmetric encryption schemes, and create secure communication channels.

eSEs can be programmed at boot time with the credentials required to make secure connections to cloud servers automatically.

Successful security is about paying attention to detail – every detail. For example, eSE must protect the exchange of information with the host application processor using secure communication channels. For the second level of security, eSE can be given a single-use key that is used to “bind” the two parts together when the system first starts to exchange with the application handler.

eSE can generate cryptographic key pairs and random numbers, calculate cryptographic hashes, and directly handle various encryption and decryption types. Some security controllers are also designed for the future, supporting the key lengths to remain relevant as OEMs switch to more robust encryption schemes.

Security consoles with these features provide a solid foundation for building a secure “chain of trust” across smart home appliances and networks. Each security console can be given a unique identifier, user privacy, and encryption key. These devices are protected so that each device can be authenticated and private information is kept confidential. In addition, encryption keys and functions make it possible to create secure communication channels across the Internet and home networks, to protect data integrity and user privacy.

Smart homes can simplify your home life by automating all the essential functions in your home. However, this promise of greater convenience must go hand in hand with concerns about the security of devices and networks that enable them and the privacy of our lives captured by these systems. eSEs can provide the many building blocks needed to create and maintain the integrity and confidentiality of smart home devices and systems.

Whom to contact to enable safe and secure smart home systems?

ITofUS can help you achieve 100% security in employing smart home systems. So call us today and enjoy the automation and IoT services provided by ITofUS, an IT company focused on providing enterprise-class IT services, equipment, and solutions for businesses of all sizes.

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