A short rambling of thoughts while drafting
As this semester begins to close out, it's time to start thinking about the senior project looming in the not to near future. The muse for my project has been the house we've since taken over from my grammy - a boon of a double-edged sword im the shape of a house built in the late 1800s. As spring brings in new showers and water continues to flow throughout the house it makes sense to look into a reslilient and self-managed infrastructure that wouldn't be prone to external risks that proprietary hardware and protocols bring with them.
A friend of mine from another life has been poking around at LoRaWAN infrastructure for a long time with the intent of using it for a resilient messaging platform. Not only is it well-suited for such tasks, but with properly ranged transceivers these devices can form small mesh networks for small event relaying. The immediate thought was triggering alerts from incoming data whenever things become _spicy_, ranging from leaks around the house or even the hotwater heater pilot light going out. The initial search for a pre-made solution showed that there was a wealth of sensor network devices out there if one wanted to shell out the funds for them, driving home the point that maybe the option to DIY this was more palpable than spending 25$ a unit for thermometers with a wifi dongle on it.
This inevitably led to the mining of current research in the area, with a few things coming to mind as important to catalog for later:
- Physical deployment risks
- Logical deployment risks
- Most common vulnerabilities or failure scenarios
- Primary providers for each OSI layer (Physical, Data-link, Network, Trnasport, Session, Presentaiton, Application)
- Product sourcing
- Supply chain analysis for hardware/firmware/software
Non-exhaustive... but a decent start. The hope is that there exists - or will - such a system where the barriers to entry for deploying DIY infrastructure are lowered to a manageable level for those who have written a script or threeve in their lifetime. Or not! Who knows what will happen but it would be super rad to see democratization of home tech from the current central powers of surveillaince capitalism.