Home Automation Security — and Light Bulbs!

Last week Temitope Oluwafemi presented his work on analyzing the security of an unlikely target — the CFL light bulbs attached to home automation systems. The light bulbs were not designed for network connectivity. But, by connecting them to home automation-controlled dimmers, they can become reachable by unauthorized parties. The paper answers questions about the possibility to remotely compromise light bulbs, cause fires, seizures and other physical injuries. Fortunately, no fires were started, but we did pop/char some bulbs. It is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/oluwafemit/HomeAutomationFinal.pdf. (This work was also with Sidhant Gupta, Shwetak Patel, and Tadayoshi Kohno, and appeared at the Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER) workshop.)