Smart Home technology is a broad emerging sector, with applications ranging from appliances to energy saving to speakers. Consumers are increasingly turning to automation to optimize their daily living, and are often delighted by the concept of controlling their homes remotely. While it is still relatively expensive to have a truly ‘Smart’ home, individual devices are becoming more competitively priced.

More and more, homes are being tailored to a family’s schedule, automatically controlling the thermostat and other energy systems, letting people into the home using facial recognition technology, or even doing something as simple as opening the blinds each morning. The possibilities are endless – and therefore, so are the vulnerabilities.

There are several key security concerns when it comes to Smart Homes. Though these devices that are installed into your home may have innocuous purposes, they can hold a surprising amount of personal and sensitive consumer data. Other devices, like smart locks, are clear targets for potential hacks, allowing criminals to freely enter your home without a clear sign of a break-in.

Companies that sell these devices can suffer major financial repercussions and reputational losses if their devices are hacked, such as the hack on the Mi-Cam baby monitors. All of this information, and the communications between the devices that facilitate remote control of the device, forms a machine-to-machine network which can have glaring vulnerabilities.

While security teams need to continue to do routine checks, like pentesting and regular patching, to ensure the strength of their network, there needs to be a new way of ensuring secure machine-to-machine communications. Angoka’s unique security protocol provides a hardware solution, serving as the last line of defence against cyber attacks. Using a decentralised cryptographic protocol, our system authenticates communications on both sides and ensures its authenticity. This solution can be built into any Smart or IoT device.

Smart Homes are undoubtedly the future of living – even now, we all have devices we could barely imagine living without. But this shouldn’t mean hackers can take control of your device and take advantage of your data. Smart device manufacturers need to apply new technologies, such as Angoka’s communications protocol, ushering in a new standard for machine-to-machine security.