this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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I'm an IT professional, specifically in infosec, and it's silly to go to those extremes. I have tons of smart home devices, and they're all perfectly secure since I run Home Assistant and block them from the internet with a firewall.
Do they tell you in their manual what ports they work with, or is there a website that will let you know based on a product?
The good thing is that you don't need to know which ports to block. You just set your firewall up to deny by default and then start whitelisting the things you want to allow.
Even easier if you put your "smart" devices in a separate network, then it's just:
Now you can surf the internet, control your devices and they can't phone home
There are a lot of things that won't play by those rules. A roomba will tell you to f right off without internet access. You have to pick and choose your hardware or make concessions to what can access the outside.
Probably implied in this person's post (which is what I do) is that you just don't buy things like that. I started with generic wifi devices which require internet and phone home. I moved everything over to zigbee. Another point is that if you trunk them into vlans like this, the problem with them phoning home is much less of a concern because they can't get much data more than when you turn the devices off/on which is pretty benign imo.
But even still, the main reason for doing this for me anyway would be less because I am worried about that data going to the companies (which is bordering on useless in this scenario for non-nefarious purposes) and more about reducing the attack vectors. If that company gets hacked, they have basically useless data. If one of the devices become an attack vector and allows someone into your network, it's trunked so there is no where to go...
Ty!
You can isolate devices without having to figure out which ports they use.