The lights, gas and temperature control system automatically shut down to save energy after you left home,the lock automatically locked, at the same time the security system start to work, guarding the family security; when you at home, the sound equipment play your favorite melody immediately,the refrigerator would remind what food material have at home,and recommend some food to you. This is the imagination of most people for the future intelligence home life. But need to achieve these functions, could not be separated from kinds of sensors.
These sensors are spread over every corner of your house, constantly collecting data and uploading to the cloud, analyzing your behavior through a large data system.
With these sensors, manufacturers can know what your family’s daily necessities would be run out soon, and promptly remind you to buy,if your food material include chicken, the refrigerator would ask you if you want to eat your favorite curry chicken, if you said:”yes”,the refrigerator would still tell you what kind of seasoning is still missing.These scenes have been integrated into your life. They will soon become more complete and more popular in human’s life.
The sensors give us lot of convenience, however, these evolving performance also has its dark side. In the Internet age, almost all sites that collect,share and sell the user’s information, the large organizations or company use the data information to provide some news,or some goods to us what they think we like,they have many ways to let us to pay the attention to their pages, and then Let’s click on the ads which special for us. This phenomenon would still go on in the Internet of Things era and will be presented in another form: your home TV and voice aides would always pushing the ads to you.
And this is the ideal situation, the worst case is that these sensors are hijacked by hackers, they take a look at your privacy, and even endanger your personal safety.
On April 2015, a couple in Washington, United States, get into trouble situation:their three-year-old son has been complaining that a stealth man would come out to talk to him at night. At the beginning, they don,t believe, until one day they really heard the stranger’s voice coming from the baby monitor which installed in their son’s room. The voice said: “The children, get up, your father is looking for you.” The More creepy thing is :they found that the device’s camera lens will follow them when they move. This is just one of the horrifying stories of many family networking equipment hijacked by hackers. The bad situation is that your privacy was stolen, but you are still ignorant of about it.
It must be admitted that these dangers are real, but that does not mean that we should stop to use and far from the Intelligence home equipment. In fact the Intelligence home equipment is like a hammer, it can smash something, also can be used for construction. It’s stupid if we completely reject the smart home equipment, the wise decision is how best to use this “hammer” to build our beautiful future life. This process depends on the joint efforts both of consumer and manufacturers.
For the users, a brutal reality is that not all smart networking devices have built-in basic security measures. Therefore, the devices’s safety need the user to set the devices and the right use way to maintain, such as frequent rechange the router’ password. The home router is the gateway to all the smart home devices at your home, and it is also control all network traffic, so you must protect it properly. Hackers have been easy hack into the home router,just because the router factory set up a pre-set a fixed management password, and the average home users often forget or do not know to change the password. In addition, the choice of more secure WPA2 encrypted communication protocol is equally helpful.
At the moment,the smart phones plays a important role in the smart home system , the most of smart home devices can controlled by the mobile APP, so it,s very necessary to ensure the smart phones safety. First, should keep the phone’s firmware up-to-date. Second, download only the applications provided by your smart device vendor, and to check the permissions required by the program before installing. In addition, installing a set of action security software helps prevent malicious applications or program code executing from your phone.
However, what the users can do is still very limited, manufacturers need to make more contribution to the security of intelligent home systems. Equipment manufacturers must have a good mentality: any device once connected to the Internet, it may be abused. Therefore, it’s necessary to add the security design when develop a new product in the early stages, for example,it’s a good choice to encryption the data. In addition, manufacturers can also make some restrictions on the communication protocol, because this is the main attack channel of criminals. As long as it encounter any suspicious network traffic, the device can send a notification to warn the user. The Household networking equipment manufacturer should consider provide a easy and intuitive security function interface when design a new product, allow users can solve the safety problems easy when encounter security issues.
All in all, smart home is still in its infancy, it brings us a lot of convenience and also with implies risk, like a double-edged sword, depending on how we use it. In the future, with the advancement of technology, the security of intelligent home system will be greatly improved, but it can not eliminate the security risks, so consumers should pay more attention when enjoying modern technology. Equipment manufacturers still have lot of works to do on fighting the risks.
As a printed circuit boards manufacturer and a PCB Assembly factory,we wish we can do more contribution for the Intelligence home equipment,especially when some electronic factory need us to design and produce the printed circuit boards and assembly the PCB for them.
