I understand that opening up the Bluetooth capability on the iHost could hold security risks in terms of unauthorized access to the iHost.
Would this risk be limited to the specific iHost unit in my house or could it potentially impact other iHost users?
If the risk is limited to my iHost alone, why don’t they consider giving me the option to activate it or not, with the understanding that I accept the potential risks.
Would it not be similar to activation the WiFi option under the Pilot features tab?
Anyways, it is probably like Farting against Thunder, cheers, Matt
I think your question is quite reasonable. Bluetooth certainly adds another potential attack surface, but that doesn’t automatically mean it represents a meaningful security threat to a typical iHost installation.
An attacker would first need to be within Bluetooth range and exploit a specific vulnerability in the Bluetooth stack or its implementation. Even if that resulted in code execution on the iHost, they would still have to find something useful to do with a compromised home automation hub. It’s not exactly a mission-critical server
The situation is also very different from exposing a service to the Internet. A Bluetooth attack is inherently local, and in a normal home environment the attacker would have to be physically nearby.
I use Bluetooth on my Home Assistant mini PC for BLE devices, and I have never seen any evidence of a practical attack against HA through Bluetooth. Of course, that doesn’t prove the risk is zero. It does put the risk into perspective.
So I agree with your main point: if SONOFF considers enabling Bluetooth a security risk, they should explain the actual threat model. If the risk is limited to the individual iHost, why not make Bluetooth an opt-in feature with a clear warning and let the owner accept that risk? And there is one other thing that makes the security argument somewhat puzzling: SONOFF doesn’t disable iHost’s WAN connectivity simply because an Internet connection represents a vastly larger potential attack surface than local Bluetooth.
And yes, perhaps we’re still just farting against thunder.
