July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

SmartThings CTO Jeff Hagins turned on the Christmas lights in Paris, but the Christmas tree was in Minnesota. And when one of his developers back in the U.S. hit the liquor cabinet (there was a contact sensor on the door), Hagins got an SMS alert. SmartThings raised 1.1 million on Kickstarter (and announced a $3 million investment at LeWeb) to “add intelligence to everyday things” and the things they are starting with are in your home.

The first part of the system is a hub that forms the bridge between the Internet and home devices supporting low-power, wireless protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave. SmartThings adds a set of reference devices to that: a motion sensor, a contact sensor that can be attached to doors and windows, and a low-resolution cloud-controlled camera. You can also use standards-based devices from other manufacturers. Finally, there’s the SmartTag, a keyfob that indicates your presence and also acts as an environment sensor. All kinds of apps will run on top of the basic platform.

“We come at the Internet of Things from the perspective of a bunch of cloud software guys,” says Hagins. “Our tendency was to divorce the intelligence from the devices.” He argues that countering that tendency gives consumers more choice and makes life far easier for developers. “The Internet of things has been held hostage by firmware developers,” he continues. “That’s not a common skill set. A web developer should be able to jump into an IDE, write a smart app that integrates and works with these physical devices, and push a button to deploy.”

The idea of the “smart home” has been around since the 1950s but never became mainstream. The smartphone supplied one of the missing pieces. “We are now carrying the perfect console for the Internet of Things, the smartphone, and 50 percent of consumers in the US and in Europe have one.”

SmartThings polled Kickstarter supporters on what applications they wanted most. DIY home security came out at the top of the list. The definition of security here was broad. It was not just about protecting your home from external threats but also internal threats like a pipe bursting and ruining your wood floors.

Control of entryways was another requirement. “When I use this device as the console for so much of my life, it controls my finances, my communications, my social engagements, restaurant reservations, my music system, my TV. It’s controlling so much and yet I can’t control my front door? We haven’t reinvented the front door in 1,000 years,” Hagins explains.

The next most popular request was care of people and pets. Do you know when your kids get home? Can you tell if the dog’s gotten out of the yard? That your elderly mother has taken her medicine? 

SmartThings’ 6,000 Kickstarter backers will receive the hub and a set of devices in January. The business model hasn’t yet been decided. It may depend on the distribution channels the company chooses. Partners like retailers should be able to add their own value on top of the platform by creating custom application. The company also recently announced a $100,000 contest for software developers and device makers.

SmartThings was founded in 2012, is based in Washington DC, and has a staff of 25.

Hackers showed they have a very long reach at the Defcon hacker conference this week. They can turn off your power or hack your home automation systems through internet-connected power lines.

Independent security researchers David “Rel1k” Kennedy and Rob “Kc57″ Simon told the audience that they were releasing free tools that will let hackers break into home automation, business automation, and security systems that operate over the electrical wires of a building. It’s one more example of how hackers can pretty much break into any computerized technology available.

“We have to bring more exposure to this attack vector,” Kennedy said in his talk, which drew a big crowd at Defcon.

The newest “broadband over power line” (BPL) networks allow users to extend their internet connections over electrical wires to places where wireless networks or wired Ethernet networks won’t easily reach or just won’t do the job, such as living rooms that need very high-speed internet connections to play streaming games or movies. BPL networks can deliver broadband internet at 35 megabits to 40 megabits a second, depending on a variety of factors. Home automation systems use these BPL networks to control devices such as lights, electronic lights, air conditioners, security cameras, and security alarms.

But Kennedy and Simon found that the signals are sent unencrypted over the wires and don’t require the things that are connected to them to be authenticated. Much like water meters, this fact makes the networks vulnerable to hacking. The hackers say they can connect a “sniffer,” which captures signals sent along the wire. That allows them to collect the raw signals and then try to decipher them. Once they do that, they can send commands through the network that countermand what the home owner wants.

Kennedy and Simon said they took a couple of months to create their open-source tools to hack into home automation systems that use the X10 electrical wire protocol. Normally, you plug a device like a light into an X10 adapter, which plugs into a wall socket. That allows the X10 device to turn that light on or off via commands from the home automation system.

That protocol doesn’t support encryption. The hackers say their X10 Sniffer tool can monitor what is connected to an X10 network and what the devices are doing. Their X10 Blackout tool can jam signals on the network. The tools use a $16 Teensy microcontroller board to emulate a keyboard on the network. The first time the hackers tried it, they fried their Teensy.

They also investigated the Z-Wave wireless communications protocol for home automation. That supports AES encryption standard, but they only found one device using the AES encryption and it was doing so incorrectly. You can jam a Z-Wave system, but that is illegal. The researchers showed how the hacking tools work. They can plug them inside a power socket outside a house or into a house next door, since signals from one house can be detected from afar because they may use the same interconnected wiring.

Kennedy said he could detect signals from 15 home automation systems around his home in Ohio. The tools can be preprogrammed to jam a signal if someone breaking into a house triggers an alarm by opening a window. The tool can sniff data remotely and send it to a cell phone, where a user could send back commands via text messages to disable an alarm.

By doing surveillance, cyber-savvy thieves could figure out when home owners are at home or not. They could jam the alarms and break into the house.

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