The IoT market is set for rapid growth, with a projected installed base of more than 30 billion units by 2025. Yet several challenges continue to impede this growth. There are still too many incompatible protocols; numerous smart-home devices don’t work effectively across multiple ecosystems; and there is an increased need for device security. So what needs to be done to enable the future smart home?
From a functional standpoint, the future of the smart home lies in completely intuitive user experiences, increased security, and greater interoperability. This will happen through the evolution of passively obedient devices that need to be manually controlled into actively intelligent IoT smart-home ecosystems acting on our behalf.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, we are spending more time at home than ever before, making the benefits — and challenges — of smart-home devices all the more apparent. As smarter devices become increasingly integrated into people’s homes and personal lives, we are also seeing a need for greater IoT security. Smart-home devices like voice assistants, security systems, and others that collect and store user data must include security that blocks hackers from being able to compromise smart devices and the data they transmit.
Interoperability is also key to the future success of the smart-home market, and industry efforts to promote interoperability standards like the Zigbee Alliance’s Project Connected Home Over IP (aka “CHIP”) will help ensure that smart-home consumer experiences are intuitive and seamless across protocols and devices.
Actively intelligent smart-home devices
Many of today’s smart-home devices could be called passively obedient; they do as they are told to do when they are told to do it. Users can schedule tasks, like turning on the coffee pot five minutes before the morning alarm is set to go off. Users can also make rules, such as turning on the air conditioner when the temperature rises to a set threshold. But schedules and rules are still the system just doing what it has been told to do. In terms of efficiency, a passively obedient smart home can save only as much energy as a person is willing to program into their settings.
An actively intelligent smart home is infused with machine learning, capable of recognizing a family’s patterns and preferences through observation and inference and then using collected data to independently make decisions. These decisions consider many factors that users simply do not want to think about or manually program. The more intelligence in a system, the more ways its performance can be optimized.
Programmed rules must generalize preferences for everyone living in the home, but an intelligent smart home can profile the habits and preferences of each person individually. When only one person is home, smart-home technologies can optimize performance based on this person’s habits and preferences. When several people are home at the same time, the house is also able to give priority to one person, if that is desired.
Regulating and certifying smart-home device security
As the number of IoT smart-home devices grows, so does the risk of cyberattacks that can put an entire household at risk. As smart-home devices gain intelligence, they collect greater amounts of information about the home’s residents that, if compromised, could be used to identify and track individuals without their knowledge. For example, without privacy measures in place, a thief could simply ask the house when no one will be home or access personal data to conduct for fraudulent transactions. For years, user privacy was something that device makers could ignore, providing only a token level of protection that is simply no longer an option.
New regulations are also requiring stronger security for IoT devices. In 2020, the U.S. passed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020, the first U.S. federal law addressing IoT security. The act requires that federal agencies procure only devices that meet minimum cybersecurity standards and establishes a vulnerability reporting and notification program.
Two states already have IoT legislation: California’s law forbids the sale of devices that don’t have reasonable baseline security measures, and Oregon’s IoT law is similar to California’s. In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) exacts stiff financial penalties for violations of user privacy, and regulation is expanding with IoT security legislation throughout the world.
As security threats evolve, so must smart devices. Industry leaders have developed security certifications to help distributors and users evaluate the safety of IoT products. One such framework is the PSA Certified program, which was co-founded by Arm in 2017 to provide a clear framework for securing connected devices, from analysis to security assessment and certification. The framework provides standardized resources to resolve the growing fragmentation of IoT requirements and remove security as a barrier for product development.
PSA Certified offers three levels of security assurance, with the highest — PSA Certified Level 3 — demonstrating a significant commitment to device security. Currently, the only silicon innovator to be awarded Level 3 certification is Silicon Labs’ EFR32MG21, a wireless SoC with the Secure Vault security technology suite. At PSA Certified Level 3, silicon vendors must meet requirements on a complex protection profile that covers substantial protection from a range of sophisticated software and physical IoT attack vectors.
Plays well with others
In addition to being more intelligent and secure, smart-home devices must interoperate with each other as well as coordinate actions. The leading IoT players understand how necessary interoperability is to the success of the market. This is why groups are developing integrated IoT standards and why companies such as Amazon and Google are starting to work together to create standardized APIs for the smart-home ecosystem. When smart devices can work together, everyone wins.
As mentioned, Project Connected Home Over IP is the smart-home industry’s largest group effort to create a free, open-source connectivity standard that improves security and interoperability between devices and ecosystems. The collaborative includes the world’s largest smart-home device makers like Amazon, Apple, and Google and is an excellent example of using collaborative resources to advance interoperability at the application layer. Silicon Labs strongly supports Project CHIP, and with more than 90 companies across multiple industries actively contributing to this effort, Project CHIP is likely to have a massive positive impact on the smart home.
In addition to new interoperability standards, smart devices soon won’t be limited to areas around the home. For example, Amazon Sidewalk and Z-Wave Long Range both promise to greatly extend the working range of low-bandwidth, low-power smart lights, sensors, and other devices installed in and around our homes. With more employees working remotely than ever before, Amazon foresees using sub-gigahertz technology to increase the connection range of devices to over half a mile. Homeowners will then be able to place smart devices anywhere on their property, even in areas to which their Wi-Fi networks don’t currently reach. Extending the scope and usefulness of the smart home in this way will open the door to a whole new wave of smart-home innovation.
Summary
The smart home is evolving daily as the line between work and home blurs. Demands on devices will continue to accelerate as flexibility and the need to be easy to use and smart enough to operate without constant user input grows. The security is already in place for technologies to maintain user privacy, prevent devices from being hijacked, and protect intellectual property. New industry collaboration is opening doors for greater interoperability and developing new standards that will extend the intelligent, secure boundaries of the home beyond what we can imagine today. The next step is simply integrating all these elements into every IoT layer and, of course, not missing the chance to turn imagination into reality by utilizing all that IoT has to offer in building the future smart home today.
About the author
Jake Alamat is vice president and general manager of IoT Home & Consumer at Silicon Labs, where he is responsible for leading the company’s smart-home efforts. Alamat is a technology industry veteran, having previously held leadership positions at NXP and Texas Instruments. He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Michigan State University. Silicon Labs is based in Austin, Texas, and has shipped more than 4 billion chips worldwide since its founding in 1996. Learn more at www.silabs.com.
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