Who has access to that smart home you’re buying?

You got the keys to the house, but someone else may have the keys to all of the systems inside the house, including the door locks.

You’ve just moved into a lovely house. It has these wonderful smart lights, with a wonderful smart oven, fancy smart thermostats, with a smart refrigerator, smart locks, and a smart security system. There’s only one problem: not only do you not have all that fancy access for your apps, but perhaps the old owner still does, and he didn’t leave willingly, something you don’t know. Sounds crazy? We sure have come a long way from just getting the keys and the garage door openers, and one cannot just call a locksmith.

Philips Hue Bridge
Philips Hue Bridge

Many – but not all – IoT-enabled devices have some form of factory reset capability. Often, this amounts to inserting a paperclip into a pinhole and holding it for 10 seconds or so, but as we’ll see the procedure varies by device type, and it is not possible for some devices. Your stove is unlikely to have anything to stick a metal object in, for instance, nor will outdoor lights. In these cases, there will generally be some vendor instructions. In the case of Philips Hues, the only available reset option is to reset the bridge that is used to communicate with the lights. If the bridge is fastened to the wall, as demonstrated in the picture, this means removing it first. This, by the way, requires not only that the bridge be re-paired with the lights and with your app, but that all configuration for the lights be re-established.

Yale Assure Lever Lock
Yale Assure Lever

What about smart locks? Clearly one of the highest priorities upon taking possession of a home is to control who can enter. If you are leasing a home, some smart locks have master codes that the landlord will set and maintain. In this case, all is “good” (assuming you don’t mind your landlord having access) unless the landlord loses the code. If you bought your dwelling, or if the landlord did lose the code, what to do? Again, this will vary by vendor. For example, here are the instructions for the Yale Assure Lever (YRD256):

  1. Remove battery cover and batteries.
  2. Remove the interior escutcheon to access the reset button.
  3. Locate the white reset button near the PCB cable connector.
  4. Press and hold the reset button for a minimum of three (3) seconds while simultaneously replacing the batteries.
  5. Once batteries are replaced, release the reset button.
  6. Reassemble the lock.

You might be wondering what an escutcheon is. According to Google, it’s a flat piece of metal for protection and often ornamentation, around a keyhole, door handle, or light switch.

SKS Double Oven
SKS Double Oven

Next, let’s have a look at the oven. Let’s say that you have a Signature Kitchen Suite Double Wall Oven such as the one pictured to the left. According to the instructions, all it says is… follow the app instructions. You better hope there are some, or a service call to SKS will be in order. By the way, one might reasonably ask what could happen if you don’t reset this device? First, the device itself won’t be able to receive security updates, assuming the company issues any to begin with. This means the oven could be vulnerable to attack. If the oven app was used by the previous owner, then the chances are, it has joined and would be looking for the old Wifi network. But we really can’t say, because there’s no clear documentation. This holds true for many “smart” devices.

Genie StealthDrive 750 Plus
Genie StealthDrive 750 Plus

Oh and then there’s that garage door. Here’s the Genie StealthDrive 750 Plus, featuring what they call Aladdin Connect. Their stated “advantage” is that you can “Control and monitor the status of your garage door from anywhere with your smart device.” Or the previous owner can. Or your ex-husband can. The good news is that garage door manufacturers have been in business for a long time, and understand the need to deal with lost or misplaced remotes. The bad news is that they haven’t been in the Internet security business for very long, and there are indeed no instructions on how to reset Aladdin Connect, other than to unplug it.

Oh dear.

How does one take possession of that house?!

While it is impossible to provide a comprehensive guide about all smart devices, here are here are some guidelines that will help.

First, learn about what IoT devices are in the house prior to entering a contract, or by including full disclosure and assistance as a contingency of sale. Having documentation and a customer support number available will help to assess what effort is required to shift control from the old owner to you. The simplest case may be for the old owner to transfer control to you in whatever application controls the smart appliance. Otherwise, a reset will be required.

You might want to use a simple table along the lines of the following to assist.

SystemIoT Enabled?Manual located?Known how to reset?Customer Service contact Handoff Complete
Smart Locks
Door Bell
Climate Control
Garage Door
Lighting
Oven
Fridge
Sprinkers
Smart device handover checklist

It may not be possible to reset certain devices, as we discussed. In this case, what is important is that you read the documentation and understand when you have received the necessary supervisory access. You should be able to understand who has control and who doesn’t. If there are passwords involved, you should be change them. If there is a list of authorized users, you should be able to view them and disable the ones you don’t know. If you can’t perform these features, it may cost money to correct the situation. You should know about that cost in advance.

Is all of this Smart Stuff worth it?

While it may help to think about what benefit you will gain by having smart appliances in the house, increasingly the choice may no longer be yours, as IoT capabilities diffuse through the industry. If you are moving into a place, you don’t want to have to worry about who has control of the door locks. If you are installing door locks, you may want to think twice about the headaches that may occur when you move out. Whatever you do, keep all manuals! They will be needed later.

I should point out that the vendors I named in this post are not bad vendors, but in all likelihood representative of where the market is today. Few vendors are likely to do better than them.

Is there hope for the future?

Yes. Smart home device capabilities are still evolving. Just like we had universal remote controls for televisions in the 1980s, at least some access control functions are likely to be aggregated into one or two control systems. The reason this is likely is that no manufacturer really ever wants to hear from you, because phone calls have to be answered by people whose salary takes away from their profits. This means that incentives are likely aligned for manufacturers to cooperate on standards to facilitate handover.

The Challenges of CISOs

Are CISOs investing enough in protection? Do they have good visibility to threats?

Image
Aub Persian Zam Zam

Long ago there used to be a bar on Haight St. called Aub Persian Zam Zam, run by a cranky guy named Bruno. Bruno who hated everyone, and he preferred only to serve martinis.  If you walked in before 7:00pm, he told you that table service started at 8:00pm.  And if you walked in after 7:00pm, table service stopped at 6:00pm. As a customer, I felt a little like a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). 

CISOs constantly face a challenge with their boards: how much to invest in security. If you haven’t been hacked, then you are accused of spending too much on protection (and might be out of a job); and if you have, then you spent too little (and might be out of a job).  But CISOs have to operate in the here and now. They don’t get to have the luxury of hindsight. What CISOs need is an appropriate level of investment to secure their charges and situational awareness to make good decisions.

Much is being made of the lax security that Solar Winds had. As Bruce Schneier pointed out in the New York Times, they had been hacked not just once, but several times. There was the attack on the company and then there was the attack on their customers. The attack on the customers involved the use of a DNS-based command and control (C&C) network, very stealthily crafted code, and the potential for an infected system to probe whatever was available to it at government and industrial installations across the globe. This may have been particularly damaging in the case of Solar Winds because the legitimate software could have stood in a privileged point within an enterprise, requiring access to lots of other core infrastructure. The Russians picked a really juicy target. They were, if you will, an incident waiting to happen, and happen it did. Solar Winds was detectable, but it required an appropriate investment in not only tooling but back-end expert services to provide situational awareness.

Not every target is quite so juicy. Most hackers hit web servers or laptops with various viruses. The soft underbelly of cybersecurity, however, are the control systems, who themselves have access to other infrastructure, as was demonstrated this past month, when a hacker attempted to poison a Florida city with lye. Assuming they have one, the Oldsmar CISO might have some explaining to do. How might that person do so, especially when it is the very system meant to protect the others? It starts by knowing how one compares to one’s peers in terms of expenditures. It’s possible to both under- and overspend.

Gordon Loeb Model

Optimal investment models for cybersecurity has been an ongoing area of research. The seminal Gordon-Loeb Model demonstrates a point of optimality and a point of diminishing returns for risk mitigation. The model doesn’t given you the shape of either curves. That was the next area of research.

For one, some things are easy to do, and some are hard; but the easy things are often not the right things to do. Low level cybersecurity professionals sometimes make the wrong choices, being risk seeking for big ticket items like device policy management, two-factor authentication, training, and auditing; while being risk adverse to matters that are within their control. Back in 2015, Armin Sarabi, Parinaz Naghizadeh, Yang Liu, and Mingyan Liu set out to answer this question. The table below liberally borrowed from their paper shows a risk analysis of different sectors.

Sarabi et al, Prioritizing Security Spending: A Quantitative Analysis of Risk Distributions for Different Business Profiles, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2015.

What this says is that based on reports received, configuration errors were a substantial risk factor pretty much everywhere but accommodation and food services, but they suffered because employees share credentials. It was a limited survey, and surely the model has changed since then. In the intervening time, cloud computing has become far more prevalent, and we have seen numerous state actors take on a much bigger, and nastier, role. It’s useful, however, is for a CISO to have situational awareness of what sorts of common risks are being encountered, and to have some notion as to what best practices are to counter those risks, so that whatever a firm spends is effective.

Expenditures alone don’t guarantee against break-ins. Knowing one’s suppliers and their practices is also critical. Knowing that Verkada had sloppy practices would have both deterred some from using their cameras, and in turn encouraged that provider to clean up their act. Again, situational awareness matters.


Gordon Loeb Diagram by By Luca Rainieri – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

It’s Not the Doorbell, It’s the Cloud

Your password in the cloud was weak, not the IoT device this time. But there are emerging IoT standards like DPP that can help do away with passwords.

You have to have been hiding under a rock over the last week not to have heard about scare stories about kids being tormented by perverts and others being violently extorted through various Ring products. Not exactly what you were expecting from your security product, was it?

With so many reports of IoT devices being vulnerable to attack, one might leap to the idea that the Ring device itself has been poorly designed, and thus broken into, but one would be wrong. That is because, like so many IoT devices, Ring products make use of the cloud to offer a service. Here’s how it all works.

How you access that home IoT device

When you establish an account, you are doing this not on the doorbell, but on a service somewhere on the Internet to which the doorbell connects. This is evident, because when you go to ring.com, you can log in with the account that you have previously established in the app.

Later during device setup, the doorbell is registered with the service, using the phone’s setup app. This is likely the only time the phone would directly communicate with the doorbell. All other communications flow through the service, as drawn above.

So how did someone else get to control your device? If you are not using two factor authentication, an attacker requires two pieces of information to control your device: your email address and your password. Your email address can easily have appeared in public if you have joined a public mailing list, or had made a comment on a poorly designed web site. An attacker may also be able to guess your password if you have used that same password on a service that has been compromised (hint: many have), or the password itself is obvious.

Some recent research has found that long or complex passwords aren’t good because people write them down or forget them. On the other hand, Ring will accept “12345678” as a password, and quite a number of other commonly used passwords that can be found on this list of stupid passwords. First piece of advice in this article: don’t use those passwords!

Ring also offers the option to register a cell phone with your account, so that when you log in, you will receive a code via SMS that you must enter to access your account. This two factor authentication (or 2FA) is stronger, and well worth the mild inconvenience, given that this is your house and its security we are talking about.

All of this is about securing your online account. The only reason that the EvilBadDoer can bother Little Johnny and take over your doorbell or security camera, at least in this moment, is that EvilBadDoer hacked your online service password to the service controls the device.

Could this marriage of IoT devices and online services be used to provide a stronger authentication? Possibly. Because a device communicates with the cloud once it’s set up, and because your phone communicates with the cloud after the doorbell is setup, it is possible for the device to provide the doorbell a token. However, for that to work, communications must be secured between the device and the doorbell during setup. Earlier this year, researchers found that this was not the case, the reason being that the doorbell was simply using unencrypted HTTP to share information about your wifi network. Bad Ring! No Ring biscuit!

Luckily, there are some onboarding standards that Ring and others could leverage to help improve matters. One is EasyConnect by the Wifi Alliance, otherwise known as Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP). Here’s how DPP works:

Wifi Easy Connect

With DPP, you can use an app to scan a QR code printed on a label that came with the device that contains the public key that was installed during the manufacturing process. The app then looks for the device and authenticates using that key. Look, Ma! No passwords. DPP was primarily intended to be used for Wifi connectivity, but there’s no reason that the same trust couldn’t be leveraged to do away with Ring passwords. This is something that Amazon and others should consider.

There are some remaining challenges. For instance, what happens if you lose your phone? Can you repeat the exercise, and if you do so, would you have to do so with all the Ring devices in your house? To me this is best handled with some sort of backup before one loses one’s phone.

The key point here is that IoT can actually help itself if we adopt stronger onboarding technologies, like EasyConnect. This will take some time to get right. As a customer, you might want to ask about EasyConnect to help ease password problems so that Little Johnny can sleep easier.

Should I have that IoT device on my home network?

Yesterday I wrote about my cousin’s smart oven, and the risks of having it networked. Does this mean that you should have no IoT devices in your house? If not, how should you decide which ones are worth connecting? Here are three questions you might want to ask.

Does connecting the device to your network offer you any perceptible value?

Sometimes the answer is going to clearly be “yes”. For example, if you are taking a vacation in the middle of the winter in some cold place, you might want to know that your home’s heater broke down before your pipes froze. Having a thermostat configured to alert you to this fact might prove very useful. On the other hand, if you are in a place where such a concern is unwarranted or you would have no reason to worry about such things, maybe that same device does not need connectivity.

Will the device function correctly without connectivity?

Don’t expect an Amazon Echo to function, for instance. There is a reason why a great many IoT manufacturers are requiring Internet connectivity for their devices: the more intelligence they can move into their servers, the less intelligence is needed in the device itself, making it cheaper to build. If you are going to have a function like this in your house, this is actually an environmentally friendly way to go. Fewer parts require fewer resources used to build and to later dispose. But if a device does function properly and fully without Internet connectivy, why plug it in?

Does that device need continuous Internet connectivity?

You are unlikely to connect and reconnect your television every time you want to watch a video, but maybe you only need that thermostat connected while you are on vacation, for instance, or maybe an appliance needs a firmware update via the Internet. Occasionally connecting a device may make sense. However, take care: if you only plug in devices while you are on vacation, someone may be able to notice that and choose that time to break into your home.

Some Internet routers have the ability to block devices at certain times. Typically this is used to limit children’s access. However, one can also use these filters for other purposes. The problem is that this is nearly as annoying as having to deconfigure devices themselves. I’ll discuss this more in the near future.

Think before you buy!

The risk to your home and your privacy is real. Realistically, however, you will have some IoT devices in your house. Think about what value you derive from them, and what can go wrong if they are attacked before you buy.

Would you want your cousin using a connected oven?

Recently my cousin installed a smart oven into her home. It is top of the line. She wrote on social media that it texted her to tell her that it needed to clean itself, which it did before her second cup of coffee. How cool is that?

I immediately feared for her safety. Here is a slightly edited version of what I wrote to her:

IoT is a nice convenience, but there are a few things you should know. First, I guarantee that there are vulnerabilities in the device, even if some have yet to discover them. This is true for *any* connected device. Those vulnerabilities may be exploited at some point. What will happen then?

First, it’s possible that attacker could simply disable the oven. They probably won’t do this unless they are able to communicate with you. But since the oven seems to be sending you messages, it’s possible that they will do this and ransom you to re-enable it. (If that happens, don’t pay.)

Whether or not you can control the oven from the app, don’t think for a moment that hackers won’t be able to gain that level of control. That presents a far more serious risk: a fire, especially if the hackers are able to detect that the cooking temp is supposed to be 350, and turn the thing up to broil or clean.

The other thing that will happen is that the oven will attack other Wifi-enabled devices in your house or elsewhere. If you have a Wifi-enabled thermostat, maybe it will attack that. Some of those devices have cameras and microphones. The attackers aren’t going to be nice about what information they collect. They’re out to make money or worse.

Will any of this happen? Yes – to many people. Am I being paranoid? Maybe a little. Appliance manufacturers may know how to make excellent oven mechanisms, refrigerator compressors, stove top elements, etc, but they generally know very little about Internet security and their risks. Even those who know a lot get it wrong all the time, simply because we’re human.

And so are you gaining any great convenience by having the Wifi turned on, apart from a 5:30am wake up call to let you know that it needs to clean itself? If yes, you have a trade off to make. If not, just disable its darn Wifi.

This is how I feel about technology and the ones I love. Presumably you have some of those. There are definitely times when IoT is necessary, and when convenience is probably worth the risk. But consumers really need to think about this long and hard, and we professionals need to provide them a decent decision framework. I’ll talk about that next.