2020-09-19 - LAN of Things

you know this old joke, that in IoT “S” stands for security, right? on the other hand we do want to have things connected at home, as it makes many things (small home automation) nice and easy. so we have a technical contradiction: we want to have things connected for ease of operation, but they cannot be connected because this opens them up for an attack. can we solve it?

this can be solved via time/space analysis. the key observation is WHEN and WHERE you need things to be connected. most of the times, it is just when you are at home! either to directly control them or to automate something with them. so it turns out it is fairly simple – just don't connect any of these devices to the internet. use LAN/WiFi instead. preferably separate network, but in general any LAN will do.

it is true that home IoT is not all IoT out there. similar concepts however can often be applied to out-of-the-house-IoT.

note that if you ever need remote access, even for a short period of time, temporary VPN setup will do the trick.