Researchers Sound The Alarm On Smart Home Hub Security Vulnerabilities

As seen on MSN:

Smart devices can make life a lot easier. We may not have flying cars or robot butlers, but the ability to control electrical appliances throughout your home via an app or your voice is arguably the one sci-fi future prediction that we did get a functional version of. Unfortunately, it turns out your smart home does have its flaws, and those flaws could leave you vulnerable to attacks.

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Researchers at the University of Georgia have used machine learning and AI to develop an app called ChatterHub, which is capable of tearing smart home security apart. The app mainly targets smart home hubs, which are often the center point of a smart home network and can be used to control most other devices. The information your hub and other devices send to each other is encrypted, but researchers discovered that they don’t have to break that encryption to find out what the signals mean. Associate professor Kyu Lee explains that the team was “able to use machine learning technology to figure out what much of the activity is without even having to decrypt the information.”