Securing the Home IoT Network

The Internet of Things (IoT) has proven its ability to cause massive service disruption because of the lack of security in many devices. The vulnerabilities that allow those denial of service attacks are often caused due to poor or no security practices when developing or installing the products. The common home network is not designed to protect against the design errors in IoT devices that expose the privacy of the users. The affordable price of single board computers (SBC) and their small power requirements and customization capabilities can help improve the protection of the home IoT network. SBC can also add powerful features such as auditing, inspection, authentication, and authorization to improve controls pertaining to who and what can have access. Implementing a home-control gateway when properly configured reduces some common risks associated with IoT such as vendor-embedded backdoors and default credentials. Having an open source trusted device with a configuration shared and audited by many experts can reduce many of the bugs and misconfigurations introduced by vendor security program deficiencies.