7MS #437: Homecoming and Home ioT Security - Part 3

Brian Johnson -

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Hello! This episode is a true homecoming in that I actually recorded it from home. Yay!

WARNING!!! WARNING!!! This episode contains a ton of singing. If you don't like singing, do not listen!!!

With that said, I wanted to follow up on part 1 and 2 of this series and share some additional cool tools that others have told me about in regards to securing and monitoring all your ioTs!

  • Home Assistant - is described on its Wikipedia page as "a free and open-source home automation software designed to be the central control system in a smart home or smart house." You can quickly grab the HA image and dump it on an SD card with Balena Etcher and be up and running in minutes. I found HA a bit overkill/complicated for my needs, but my pal Hackernovice (on 7MS Slack) says this video demonstrates why he really loves it.

  • Prometheus, recommended by our pal Mojodojo101, is "a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true." I found a great RPi install guide that will help you get it up and running in a snap. I love the capabilitiesand possibilities of Prometheus, but much like Home Assistant, it quickly got to "more than I need" territory.

The final thing we talk about today is trying to answer this question: with so many of my ioTs tied to some cloud app/service, how do I keep these accounts themselves as secure as possible?

Songs sung in this episode include: