What Products did we Ultimately Choose?

The products we selected were a smart lock, a wifi, and a connected baby monitor. We tested them in that order. All three selected products are designed to be used with mobile apps, which is the predominant practice among smart consumer devices. We wanted to make sure that we tested an app component with every product we selected, as so much of the “attack surface” of IoT devices is on these companion apps.

We chose the lock because it was made by a well-known lock maker who now makes app-connected locks through a partnership with app developers, as part of a broader suite of smart-home products such as doorbells and thermostats which are all controlled using the same third-party app. The particular model we tested was also interesting because it does not come with a physical key—one must have a working smart phone to unlock the door from the outside. This raises the stakes of a digital compromise and takeover of the device.

We chose the pressure cooker because of the clear physical safety hazard presented by a rogue pressure cooker. It also represents a company pivoting from the manufacture of solely electrical/digital kitchen appliances to micro computer-driven, internet-controlled electrical appliances. This is an increasingly common pivot for manufacturers as many existing kitchen appliances are turned into smart devices, which made it important that we include at least one such device in our testing handbook. Unlike other categories of IoT, kitchen appliances require some amount of physical interaction. For example, a coffee maker may be able to start the coffee timed to your mobile phone’s alarm, but at some point you will have to load coffee and water into the machine. This naturally limits their feature set, and in many cases, the number of other smart products they interact with. The pressure cooker’s lack of integration with other products and limited featureset also made it an interesting case study.

We chose the baby monitor because of the clear privacy and security implications that a possible compromise by a malicious attacker represents. These devices gather audio, video, and in some cases health data directly from the bedrooms of infants and toddlers, making this data some of the most sensitive imaginable. The monitor we chose consists of a camera and a mobile app that can relay video and sound data collected by the camera, and also contains its own handheld receiver, which presented a separate, non app-based interface to test.