I have recently enforced a better privacy practice for my smart home devices, that includes creating a new access point for those devices and blocking them of internet access with VLAN.
Since then, my yeelight minas celiing lights goes unavailable whenever I physically switch them off and turn them on afterwards.
One really stupid thing is it needs internet access for using LAN control feature. it’s really really dumb.
but at the same time, in this kind of age where everything wants to phone their home, i need to somehow mitigate this in every possible way such as by fooling the devices as if they have access to the internet.
Is this kind of things possible?
thanks!
Yeah I think the right response is to return the lightbulb and get a new one. One that doesn’t require an internet connection. Build some market pressure in the direction of offline appliances
That sound really a hard to do.
Basically you have to formulate the right responses that this device is looking for when it is communicating over the Internet.
My only idea is maybe you can capture the device’s request and response using Wireshark and then use a dummy server to fire the same response s back to the device inside your vlan l. You’d also need to set a DNS to reroute the traffic properly. If the device is using encryption layers that’s basically impossible iirc.
Basically you are looking to set up your own very basic mitm for that device.
Ikr. I hope it’s just icmp ping to whatever address or smth. I don’t have in-depth knowledge of wireshark so might be a tough journey
I seem to recall that a guy did do this once with a Google chromecast but he was a professional IT security of some kind, and that was years ago.
I seem to recall that same year reading about a network engineer who used their homes nest thermostat to stop his wife from sleepwalking to the kitchen to eat and ruining her diet.
It’s not that I think it can’t be done, it’s just that I think it might require you to either spoof responses or change the the firmware in some way.
Matter is supposed to solve this problem. Unfortunately, a lot of implementations still phone home, at least during provisioning.
I disagree. Matter is going to make things even much worse in this regard.
Yeah matter over WiFi is crazy good even with home assistant! I love those devices. I hope I can get my hands on if I’m financially successful lol
I have this issue with my Hisense TV. I just want to use Jellyfin and it works offline… for a while. After several days without internet, it wants to reconnect to use any apps.