With progress comes land mines. Being connected to your home and the devices therein has advantages. It has also can leave you vulnerable to hackers. This interesting information came to us from the Internet of Business and their article, “Smart home device metadata offers hackers insight into residents’ habits.”
Metadata generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a smart home could give hackers valuable clues about its inhabitant’s lifestyle and behavior. Hackers can infer private sensitive in-home activities by analyzing internet traffic from smart homes containing commercially available IoT devices, even when the devices use encryption.
The flow of data between IoT devices and remote servers is easy to recognize. The easiest way is by looking at DNS requests; these are unique to particular smart devices. Hackers could also infer user activities from changes in device traffic rates.
You can take measure to protect yourself and your data. Traffic shaping can effectively and practically mitigate many privacy risks associated with smart home IoT devices. To start with, researchers have found that 40KB/s extra bandwidth usage is enough to protect user activities from a passive network adversary.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.