Amazon Sidewalk: Should you be co-opted into a private neighborhood LoRa network?

WiFi is just not very good for crossing buildings. This is fine for the main living spaces of an average home, but once we venture out to the outskirts of our estates it starts to become less reliable. For devices connected outside of the heart of a home, this poses a problem, and it’s one that Amazon hopes to address with its Sidewalk product.

It’s a low-bandwidth networking system that uses capabilities already built into some Echo and Ring devices, as well as part of the owner’s broadband connection to the internet. The idea is to provide basic connectivity over longer distances to compatible devices even when the WiFi network is not available, but the most interesting and worrying thing is that it will also expose itself to devices belonging to it. to other people. If your internet connection goes down, your Ring devices will continue to provide a basic version of their functionality through a low-bandwidth local wireless network provided by Amazon devices owned by your neighbors.

I can see your Amazon ring from here

The huge online retailer and IoT cloud provider wants to open up some of your home broadband connection through your home security devices over a wireless network to other similar devices owned by strangers. In Amazon literature, it’s touted as offering all kinds of useful benefits to Ring and Echo owners, but this has obvious implications for both the privacy of your data if it’s being carried by other people’s devices, and for the security of your own network when devices you don’t own are passing traffic on it. For the curious, there is a white paper with more information on the system, and besides revealing that it uses 900 MHz FSK and LoRa as its RF layer, there isn’t much information on how it works. As you would expect, they solved privacy and security issues through encryption, minimizing data transmitted, and constantly changing credentials. To read the Amazon document at face value is to enter a world in which some confidence can be gained in the product.

The question on the lips of skeptical readers will undoubtedly be: what could go wrong? We would expect the devices themselves and the radio part of the network to be thoroughly investigated by those who undertake to do such things, and even if there is always a chance if someone can discover a loophole in them, it is more likely that there are weaknesses in the applications on top of the system. This is something that has affected Amazon’s IoT offerings before, like last year when their Neighbors app was found atop a much more chatty API than expected, which led to a bit more information about the neighborhood than what they had negotiated. If Amazon’s blurb is to be believed, then this system needs to be open to developers of third-party IoT devices and applications, and with each of these, the possibility of holes to be discovered increases. We will keep you posted as they emerge.

Products like the Amazon Echo and Ring are incredible showcases for 21st century technology. They are the living embodiment of an automated system Tokens future, and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t want a small slice of that future. But as you all know, the version of this future peddled by them and their competition is deeply flawed in which consumers who buy the products are largely unaware of the amount of data that is created from them. From a purely technical standpoint, the idea of ​​home security products that automatically form a low-bandwidth network to use in the event of a main network failure is exceptionally cool, but when paired with data saturation. giant Amazon monster, she assumes a little more worrying. set of possibilities. Is it possible to be George Jetson without Mr. Spacely looking over your shoulder?