Researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio have found some critical flaws in the infamous Smart Bulbs. The popular purchase of the festival season to light-up your home could lead to cyber-attacks.
Researchers Anindya Maiti and Murtuza Jadliwala conducted a review on Smart Bulbs to find out loopholes in them. The paper entitled, Light Ears: Information Leakage via Smart Lights is published in the Journal Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
Your smart bulb could come equipped with infrared capabilities, and most users don’t know that the invisible wave spectrum can be controlled. You can misuse those lights. Any data can be stolen: texts or images. Anything that is stored in a computer.
Murtuza Jadliwala, professor and director of the Security, Privacy, Trust and Ethics in Computing Research Lab in UTSA’s Department of Computer Science
Smart bulbs are connected to other IoT enabled devices in the home mainly with Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi and if these smart bulbs are infrared enabled then, potential hackers can send commands to steal data or to spy on other devices connected over the same network that means that invisible emitted infrared could make you vulnerable to potential information leakage.
Report from Science Daily shows that consumers spent over $8 Billion over such products last year and it is expected to cross $25 Billion in the coming few years.
You can protect yourselves from such attacks by purchasing only smart-hub enabled devices. The researchers also recommend that manufacturers must develop high-security devices so that they can’t be easily accessible to hackers.
