Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.
Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.
True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
Can’t bad actors still affect ZWave? Asking out of genuine curiosity
Modern Z-wave devices are pretty damn secure AFAIK.
It’s more of a spectrum saturation issue for me over a security one.
One benefit of ZWave is that it operates on the 900MHz band instead of 2.4GHz, giving it both better range and penetration and avoiding interference from WiFi.
The security benefit is that 99/100 times, connecting a device to WiFi also gives it internet access. The user has to manually intervene and block this ability, the device has internet by default. This is simply not the case for a ZWave device. For those to connect to the internet and to malicious domains, you would need to be able to access the ZWave coordinator with a compromised device. It adds a whole new necessary link to the chain.