IOT Security Active?

IoT security can be a broad concept. We have functionality already available which also inspects DNS requests coming out of the systems and blocks them if the destination is classified as malicious in the security cloud. This functionality can protect you in case your IoT device was exposed and got somehow infected with known malware like mirai. We also do our best to make sure you are protected from attacks from the internet towards your home, preventing such infections. Port scans and other external attacks are handled automatically by our firewall, we have chosen not to send alerts from those since they happen continuously and can pointlessly alarm the user.

Additional features and functionatities for protecting your network are being developed and researched. Many network and traffic inspection related features can take time to productize so that they are useful and accessible for most users. One challenge is to make sure that when we alert on an issue, it is a genuine issue and there's some clear and actionable information provided for the user on how to resolve the situation.

If you feel that some device from china you are using may be insecure because the back-end services provided by the vendor for that device are not good enough and assuming those services are critical for the functionality of that device there may not be a lot that can be done about that except replacing that device with one from a reputable vendor. Security of those cloud-services cannot be enforced in your end and blocking those services may cause your devices to stop functioning. We are also looking into functionality that could alert the user if a device known to be insecure is found in the network.

Obviously providing the capability of blocking and limiting outgoing connections from that device can be useful. We already have the ability to block those devices from accessing the internet through the devices view in your app, but we don't yet have the feature to manually block individual connections from a device.

We will continue to update the SENSE firmware automatically with security updates as well as new features. We appreciate you getting in touch. I hope this answers your question to some extent and we sincerely thank you for being a SENSE user.

Best Regards:

Simo / SENSE QA Lead