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Comment by k0ngo | Hacker News Reader

Form engineer here. We're not planning on shipping our firmware signing keys along with our product like Belkin did. Jokes aside, security, integrity and trust are our very top priorities. The hardware is designed in a way that should be extremely hard to misuse, and even if someone would be able to break the encrypted protocols, the encrypted and signed firmware images and manage to run custom firmwares on the MCU:s, they would still be limited by the extremely low power budget and the very limited amount of memory, so I would say that it is nearly impossible to store and/or transmit any meaningful amount of audio.

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As a fellow embedded design engineer, I would advise you to read up a bit on the Greek gods Hubris and Nemesis.

I wouldn't call it hubris when we're saying that we know of these aspects, consider them our most important design constraints and do our very best to address them. Not being a native English speaker, it perhaps didn't come through humble enough :)

So you're suggesting they just give up?

No, not at all - I'm just saying it is a mistake to laugh at Belkin's misfortunes.

Any plans to open source some of the software?

Not at first but it's very likely that we will at some point.

I would be far more interested if it were open source, or at least had a public API.

We do have an API, but it might not be public from day one. There will be a beta-tier on Kickstarter that will get immediate access, and when we consider it solid we'll open it up.

Are there any plans to have an Ethernet model rather than Wi-Fi?

I'd second the want for ethernet with PoE, with slots for rechargeable AA batteries for power outages. I bet more than 10% of fire alarms currently installed in the USA have a dead battery.

I completely forgot about PoE. I have zero devices that support it since it seems to be so rare. I'd go out and buy a nice switch if it had more support. I really don't like this trend of low power IoT devices that only support Wi-Fi when Ethernet+PoE is perfect for them. I'm all for having Wi-Fi built in, just not the only way to connect.

no need for a switch, you can get 5$ injection power supplies. https://www.roc-noc.com/mikrotik/routerboard/power/rb-p54.ht...

BTW, mikrotik is a very nice platform for geeks, en attendant Godot (a high load open source linux based router distro. Yes I know of openwrt, but that's kind of limited hw, hackish and prosumer? )

I'll third the desire. We've been turning the WiFi off at night, and virtually every AP we've had has had issues. So I'd much rather use ethernet for something as critical as security, due to past WiFi issues.

Out of curiosity, why do you turn off WiFi at night?

I'm getting suspicious of WiFi's actual safety, potential EMF sensitivity and all that. The same wavelength at higher powers cooks food and has never actually been proven safe at lower levels. Even though it's non-ionizing radiation ... so are the various nuclear radiation particles/waves. So we're running a test to see if turning the WiFi off affects our sleep.

I would worry more about your neighbors using your network, the transmitter in your cellphone is much more powerful than in your AP, and I will guess that you sleep much nearer to it as well... In either case, the strength falls off with the square of the distance.

No. May I ask why you would prefer that? Is it a security concern?

I don't have WPS on my router (How else do you input the SSID/Password?) and I turn Wi-Fi off when I'm not in my house so this product would be a real hassle to setup/use.

The device is configured wirelessly using the smartphone app. It'll queue the events and measurements if your wifi is down, but I see that it will be hard for you to use if you always turn your wifi off when you are away.

Is turning the wifi off when you leave a security concern or a power thing, like you're running off the grid? I'm just curious, as if it's the former and I had the same concern I'd just limit access to specific MAC addresses and make the access point invisible.

Both. Why not save power by turning off the router while shrinking the amount of time there is to break into my Wi-Fi network? I can't see a reason to leave my network on while I'm out of my house. I don't need it and as far as I can tell, my neighbors don't either.

That said if someone needed to use Wi-Fi, I'd be happy to open a guest network for them (I think my router can do that but I haven't checked).

I can understand power concerns (though I think home routers use very little KWH), but frankly shutting your router off every day to prevent intrusions is bordering on tinfoil hat-level of concern.

If you shut off WPS on your router and use WPA2-CCMP with a good passphrase, there is really no concern of someone getting into your wireless network.

>specific MAC addresses and make the access point invisible.

Both of these measures do nothing if any other device is currently connected to the wireless network. A passive attacker will still be able to see your access point (by inspecting packets sent over the air by other devices to the access point) and can spoof a MAC address to connect to it.

Not if you're not at home and hence there are no "other devices" sending packets.

This seems like a rather silly edge case though. What if you accidentally leave a phone or tablet at home and it's sending packets intermittently?

Or what if someone decides to hack you when you are at home?

These are not real security measures.

Usually this kind of gear acts like a wifi access so that you can directly connect to it and input ssid / password.

Just to add to the other comments, Power over Ethernet would be a handy way to save on batteries.

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