Smart home defenses crumble when the NEO dog arrives.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it has developed a four-legged robot designed to jam the wireless transmissions of smart home devices. The robot was revealed at the 2024 Border Security Expo and is called NEO. It is built using the Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) and looks a lot like the Boston Dynamics Spot robot.

According to the transcript of the speech by DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) director Benjamine Huffman, acquired by 404 Media, NEO is equipped with an antenna array that is designed to overload home networks, thus disrupting devices that rely on Wi-Fi and other wireless communication protocols. It will thus likely be effective against a wide range of popular smart home devices that use wireless technologies for communications.

    • Dark ArcEnglish
      11•4 months ago

      For real security, you basically have to. Even without this, jammers can be used by thieves to disable wireless cameras and security systems.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•4 months ago

      WPA2 (and I believe 3 as well) are notoriously easy to crack the passwords to. Wired is truly best for security, and for wireless WPA Enterprise can help with securing the network

      • @[email protected]English
        4•4 months ago

        I don’t believe this is the case. 3 is fairly robust, and 2 is still just brute forcing, though rapidly on a local CPU. The one that’s trivial is trivial to crack is WEP.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•4 months ago

          WPA2 is pretty trivial too. Not as easy as WEP since you do have to locally brute-force the PSK (password), but that’s pretty quick on modern systems. We had multiple assignments when I was in college that had cracking a WPA2 password as a step (in the interest of time, the instructor used passwords from the RockYou list but still)

          • @[email protected]English
            4•4 months ago

            Yeah, if you’re using common words or variants thereof, you’re gonna have a bad time. But a 128 character string of random characters is going to be functionally safe from such an attack, for now.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•4 months ago

              And you’ll go crazy every time you try to add a device that doesn’t support QR code scanning.

              Just use multiple dictionary words with a symbol or two thrown in. Or go all out and set up 802.1x with client certificates and save the PSKs for a firewalled segment of less important crap.

              Although it’s worth mentioning that wireless security means nothing to jamming. Jamming is RF, it’s destroying layer 1 before WPA matters.