Essay on OpenHAB Amazon Alexa Project: Uncovering Smart Home Security

The OpenHAB amazon Alexa project was carried out to find out how secure the everyday smart home devices are. This project was crucial in determining whether the Alexa’s cloud service has the capability of handling all voice recognitions as well as mapping the given commands with intent. Thus, the project was carried out to determine the safety of smart home devices. In the OpenHAB Amazon Alexa project, the team downloaded the openhab automation software and unzipped it. They opened the openhab by entering the browser window’s IP address of the computer they were using. However, the installation of the software was to be configured to function with the Amazon Alexa. After login to the Amazon account, the openhab gained its access to the device, Amazon Alexa. The Open home automation bus is contained with its capability of integrating multitudes of smart home devices regardless of their manufacturers. After the open hab recognized the Alexa, it was granted the task of controlling the volume of Alexa and have music selection inputs. The Wireshark was opened while still commanding the Alexa turn off the lights in bedroom

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From the research, what was discovered was that only packets sent from the computer could be sniffed. When the Alexa was issued a command from the computer, the command was sent to the cloud server of the Alexa. Server 35.161.143.250 is owned by the Amazon server in Oregon. It was discovered that interaction with Alexa is stored and encrypted in Amazon’s cloud. Thus, it was identified that whatever the users see when they follow the TCP streams is that they are not able to see the data between the Amazon’s server and the computer network. Therefore, to a certain high percentage, the OpenHAB amazon Alexa project identified that everyday smart home devices are secure. The openhab is used because of its integration power, ease automation, and its capability to run everywhere. The openhab has a pluggable architecture and thus being able to support over 200 various systems and technologies and thousands of devices (Farah, Tejada, & Correal 2014). It uses a flexible and super engine in designing rules and voice control, thus being important in this case. The openhab is a website that gives an online community and web service suit platforms aiming at indexing the open-software development community. On the other hand, the Wireshark was useful in this project because it facilitates analyzing network trafficking in real-time, making it to be the best tool in handling troubleshooting problems in the network (Chappell 2012). The Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that enables the capturing and interactively browsing the traffic operating on a computer network.

References

Chappell, L. (2012). Wireshark network analysis. PODBOOKS. COM, LLC.

Farah, G., Tejada, J. S., & Correal, D. (2014, May). Openhub: a scalable architecture for the analysis of software quality attributes. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (pp. 420-423).