Armchair to kettle, kettle to armchair
We've all heard how wonderful the Internet Of Things is going to be, whether we like it or not. This month the Internet Of Things kettle is in the news, and the news is that it leaks passwords.
If you are the man who has to have everything, and you have a hundred pounds burning a hole in your pocket, you need the iKettle. This all-metal carafe-style electric kettle boils water, and it is a standard size 1.8 litre capacity, but its USP is that it has built in WiFi and can talk to your home hub and smartphone.
What this means is that, from the comfort of your arm chair, you can now launch an app on your phone and, with just a few taps, tell your kettle to turn itself on, boil the water, and send a message back to you when the water is boiled. No more of that time-consuming walk all the way to the kitchen just to press the On button. The adverts tell me that saves two days per year. All that assumes, of course, that you have remembered to fill it with water. Otherwise, you'll get a message back demanding Fill Me, Fill Me, and be forced to leave the armchair anyway.
In this age of the internet, there must be more to an iKettle than just boiling water. Well yes, it also has a game mode, in which it can "turn making a cup of tea into good fun". It can pick a family member at random and tell them it is their turn to make the tea, and in true social networking style, you can rate each person on how good or bad they are at making a cuppa.
Many reviewers complain about the difficulty of configuring the kettle to connect to the WiFi, and whilst you can, in theory, turn on the kettle remotely, so that it is ready boiled when you get home from work, most people seem to find the app will only work when you are inside the house, and your phone is connected to your home network.
The iKettle has been around for the best part of the year, but it became news this week when security researchers discovered it was vulnerable to drive-by hacking. The kettle connects to your router which means it needs to know your router's wifi password. A hacker sitting outside your house could send a wifi signal at your premises to cause the wifi devices in the house to reset their connections, and when that happens, the kettle broadcasts the password in plain text over the airwaves, allowing it to be read by the hacker, who can then use that password to connect their own computer to your network.
There was a time when such a scenario was far-fetched, that the equipment needed to do that was big, and expensive, but these days we are awash with cheap portable wifi devices and this is entirely practical. Would a random hacker sit outside your house to hack your home network? Probably not. Would a nosey neighbour with a bit of tech savvy hack you through the wall? Possibly. But how many businesses in office blocks and business parks have one of these devices connected to their office routers providing potential back-doors into commercial systems? That's the real hunting ground.
It is not just iKettles which are potential security holes. There are smart fridges, internet radios, doorbells, and even light-bulbs all wanting to connect to our routers. We cannot just disregard the security aspects of them.
28th October 2015
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.