Collaborate Disseminate
If you are a glass-half-empty person, you’ll view Charter’s announcement that they will shutter their home security and smart home service on February 5th as another reason not to buy into closed-source IoT devices. If you are a glass-half-full person though, you’ll see the cable company’s announcement as a sign …read more
Continue reading Another IoT Debacle: Charter Offers Home Insecurity
People who were subscribed to updates on the Alexa Connect Kit (ACK) would recently have received an email informing that this kit is now available for sale. Last time we covered the ACK was back in September of 2018, the ‘release’ moniker meant ‘preview’ and there wasn’t any hardware one …read more
Continue reading New Part Day: Alexa Connect Kit Now Available For Sale
Working on a project into the wee hours is hardly uncommon for us hackers, but if you’re consistently sleeping until the afternoon, it’s possible you’re suffering from a condition known as Delayed Phase Sleep Disorder (DPSD). Put simply, your body’s internal clock is out of alignment with the world around …read more
Continue reading DIY ZigBee Therapy Lights Are Hue Compatible
Aruba Networks, a unit of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), this week announced it has added an ability to automatically fingerprint devices being attached to a network to enable cybersecurity teams to apply policies to those devices based on how clos… Continue reading Aruba Advances IoT Cybersecurity
There’s something thrilling about decoding an unknown communications protocol. You start with a few clues, poke at the problem with some simple tools, and eventually work your way up to that first breakthrough that lets you crack the code. It can be frustrating, but when you eventually win, it can be very rewarding.
It seems that [Jason] learned this while decoding the wireless conversation between his mass-market quad and its controller. The quad in question, a Yuneec Q500, is one of those mid-range, ready-to-fly drones that’s targeted at those looking to get in the air easily and take some cool …read more
Continue reading Drone Gives Up Its Wireless Secrets To Zigbee Sniffer
Back in the early days of Arduino proliferation (and before you ask, yes we realize there was a time before that too), wireless was a strange and foreign beast. IR communication was definitely a thing. And if you had the funds there was this cool technology called ZigBee that was available, often in funny blue house-shaped XBee boards. With even more funds and a stomach for AT commands you could even bolt on a 2G cell radio for unlimited range. WiFi existed too, but connecting it to a hobbyist ecosystem of boards was a little hairier (though maybe not for …read more
They say charity begins at home, well IoT security probably should too. The growing number of Internet enabled and connected devices we populate our homes with continues to grow year on year – yet, with each new device we connect up, the less confident… Continue reading Consumer IoT Security v1.01
[Michael Ossmann] spoke on Friday to a packed house in the wireless hacking village at DEF CON 25. There’s still a day and a half of talks remaining but it will be hard for anything to unseat his Reverse Engineering Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) talk as my favorite of the con.
DSSS is a technique used to transmit reliable data where low signal strength and high noise are likely. It’s used in GPS communications where the signal received from a satellite is often far too small for you to detect visually on a waterfall display. Yet we know that …read more
French hacker [akila] is building up a home automation system. In particular, he’s been working with the “SmartHome” series of gadgets made by Chinese smartphone giant, Xiaomi. First, he started off by reverse-engineering their very nicely made temperature and humidity sensor. (Original in French, hit the translate button in the lower right.) With that under his belt, he opened up the PIR motion sensor unit to discover that it has the same debugging pinouts and the same processor. Almost too easy.
For a challenge, [akila] decided it was time to implement something useful in one of these gadgets: a ZigBee …read more
Continue reading Cheap Smarthome Gadget(s) Hacked into Zigbee Sniffer
For some folks, tea is a simple pleasure – boil water, steep tea, enjoy. There are those for whom tea is a sacred ritual, though, and the precise temperature control they demand requires only the finest in water heating technology. And then there are those who take things even further by making a PID-controlled electric tea kettle an IoT device with Amazon Echo integration.
Nothing worth doing isn’t worth overdoing, and [luma] scores points for that. Extra points too for prototyping an early iteration of his design on a RadioShack Electronics Learning Lab – the one with a manual written …read more
