The House That Spied

The House That Spied on Me (Gizmodo)

the Withings Home Wi-Fi Security Camera with Air Quality Sensors that I had set up in our living room. When the camera detects motion or noise, it automatically records what it’s seeing. That’s great if you’re worried about break-ins or how people treat your kid when you’re not around, but not great for protecting the intimacy of your home. The day after I set it up, it caught me walking through the living room naked, resulting in the very first nude video of me (that I know about), which was promptly sent to the cloud and saved to the Home Cam app on my phone. This appears to be a common problem for the smart home set.

Some of my friends and family think that the privacy and security risks from using these devices are overstated. I won’t use these devices in my home until I have a better understanding of the risks and have developed some mitigations.

Risks of Trusting the Physics of Sensors

( )

Risks of Trusting the Physics of Sensors By Kevin Fu and Wenyuan Xu Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 2, Pages 20-23

( )

Kevin Fu is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.

Wenyuan Xu is Professor and Chair of the Department of Systems Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University.

And I love this:

Security is a system property. Thus, design of a sensor-driven, safety-critical system deserves supervision by a systems engineer with broad knowledge of computer security risks. Team leaders for such systems will need to master skills from physics, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering to computer science, information science, public policy, and ethics.
...
The notion of interdisciplinary education is not new to computer science. In the 1990s, the software engineering community debated a shift toward interdisciplinary education beyond the confines of computer science.10,11 Similarly, a good engineer for embedded security will not simply be a good computer scientist or a good programmer. Interdisciplinary education and teamwork is key to ensuring security of sensor-driven, safety-critical systems.