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Your Smart Home Devices Could All Be About to Stop Working


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Controlling smart home devices.

Experts say thousands of connected smart home devices could shut down with the expiration of their Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

Credit: Shutterstock

Experts say thousands of connected smart home devices could shut down with the expiration of their Secure Sockets Layer certificates, which maintain the security of products when connected to the Internet by establishing an encrypted connection between a Web server and the device or system attempting to link with it.

The warning comes shortly after several channels on Roku streaming devices stopped working, and Roku said affected customers should manually update their devices.

Online payment platforms Stripe and Spreedly experienced similar disruptions attributed to the expiration of Certificate Authority (CA) root certificates, and more expirations are anticipated.

Addressing this problem places an onus on manufacturers to include appropriate upgrades, including new root CA certificates, as part of regular security downloads.

Researchers have long urged a universal set of Internet of Things and smart-device security standards, which many manufacturers seem unwilling to implement.

From TechRadar
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