This cute owl is the extra set of eyes you need at home

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Ulo is an owl-shaped security camera that communicates through eye expressions.

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Surveillance cameras can be obvious eye sores to put around your house. If you wanted to monitor your home, you had to get over the aesthetics of security devices. Now, there’s a new way to keep an eye out, without putting a damper on your interior tastes.

The brainchild of French designer Vivien Muller, Ulo is changing the home surveillance game. While it may look like nothing more than a toy owl, this Internet-connected gadget is much more. Ulo is equipped with a two-way mirror beak housing a hidden camera and motion sensors, and is interactive with customizable LCD eyes.

Ulo comes to life when you tap it on the head, and can be controlled from your Android or iOS device, or web interface. A webpage and mobile app allows you to personalize eye color, shape and size to match any decor and taste. No logos or icons are displayed on the screens, but you instantly know what Ulo has in mind. Unlike any other surveillance camera, this owl unit communicates through eye expressions making it life-like. For example, if you want to take a picture, Ulo blinks. Its eyes also follow movements and squints when you’re watching its live-stream. Ulo’s eyes will even look tired when the battery is low, alerting you to charge it.

When you’re not at home, double tapping on Ulo’s forehead will activate its Alert Mode, which records any movement and sends an animated GIF to you via email. Plus, it can live-stream directly to your phone or webpage with 1080p HD video and audio. Ulo acts as the extra set of eyes to check what’s going on when you’re away. What’s more impressive is that it has infrared night vision and is waterproof, making Ulo an effective and versatile way of surveillance, inside and outside the house.

This adorable, high-tech owl features a Wi-Fi module, an orientation sensor, a Li-Po rechargeable battery, a mono microphone, and speaker. Ulo comes with adhesive neodymium magnets for easy attachment, as well as a micro-USB cable for recharging.

Want your own personal surveillance bird? Then fly over to Muller and his team’s Kickstarter page, where they’ve already reached over a million dollars in funding. The first batch of Ulos are expected to ship by November 2016.

Angee is an autonomous home security system

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This smart system doubles as both your security guard and personal assistant.

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Did you know that every 13 seconds, a home is broken into in the United States? In fact, 41% of burglaries happen when a system isn’t armed. Although it’d be nice to have guards protecting our homes, not all of us have that luxury or the convenience.

Angee is an advanced security and communication system that changes how you protect and connect to your humble abode. The device provides a 360-degree view of your household and is loaded with several valuable features, including voice recognition, at-the-door identification, motion-detecting rotation, advanced learning and cordless portability. By learning the daily habits of your family members, Angee can autonomously arm and disarm herself.

Setting up Angee is easy — you simply connect the device with your smartphone and add security points around throughout your rooms to secure your home. The unit provides full perimeter protection by using security tags on your doors and windows so the system knows exactly who comes and goes. In fact, it can determine suspicious activity such as movement by someone it doesn’t recognize through detecting entry and exit patterns, changes in background noise, Bluetooth signal in phones and voice differentiation. If Angee happens to sense suspicious activity, a notification is sent to your smartphone (or smartwatch) via its accompanying app so you can stream video in real-time. Plus, you can receive updates on temperature, humidity or just take a look around, if you so choose.

At roughly five by three inches, Angee boasts an ARM processor at its core and weighs about 1.3 pounds. Angee’s camera rotates to provide full coverage of a room and employs an array of six passive infrared sensors for 360-degree motion detection. The security tags are powered by two AAA-batteries and feature Bluetooth connectivity, which is not only used to wirelessly communicate with Angee, but also sense nearby phones to identify who is home. And should the power go out, not to worry. The gadget’s built-in battery enables it to sustain energy, and more importantly, continue monitoring. Similarly, if your Wi-Fi goes offline, Angee will alert you while still recording any activity and saving the footage to its local storage.

The makers of Angee built the system by learning from people’s experience with early versions of smart security systems. The team has focused on creating the smartest home security system ever — one that is useful, convenient, and tailored to each individual’s needs. And that’s not all. It can double as a personal assistant by recording all-too-often missed moments for a family member who is away, answering calls, checking the calendar and even reminding you to close the windows if rain is in the forecast.

“In the future, smart hardware and technologies will be omnipresent. They will be easy to use and perfectly integrated into our environment. These systems will understand and predict what we need, saving us time and energy, and making our lives easier and more productive. Angee is a big step toward this future,” explains CEO and co-founder Tomas Turek.

Sound like the system you’ve been looking for? Head over to Angee’s Kickstarter campaign, where the team is currently seeking $250,000. Delivery is estimated for October 2016.

CUJO guards all connected home devices from hackers

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CUJO protects your home networks against hacks, viruses, malware and other virtual intrusions.

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From Ashley Madison to Sony, the latest string of data breaches have demonstrated the significance of security in our increasingly electronic world. The days of protecting your home with just an alarm system or some anti-virus softwre are over; in fact, anything that is connected to the Internet has become a fairly easy target for malicious hackers. With this in mind, a California-based startup has introduced a gadget, called CUJO, that will guard all smart home devices against the most sophisticated virtual intrusions, from malware to phishing attempts.

One of, if not, the most intriguing attributes would have to be its simplicity. CUJO acts as a plug-and-play gatekeeper on the front end of your router with an Ethernet cable, blocking hackers and other threats before they can reach a home network and everything connected to it. The elegantly-designed unit will inspect all of the packets of data leaving and entering your home, and even analyze your device behavior so that it can detect anomalies as soon as they occur.

“CUJO goes beyond traditional security by using a multilayer approach that combines firewall, antivirus, and malware typically found in separate devices,” the startup writes. “Unlike traditional solutions, CUJO adapts and reacts when your home is attacked and does not rely just on libraries of known malware issues. We analyze a humongous amount of behavioral data in our cloud and push learnings from one home to all CUJO protected homes.”

Another thing you will notice about CUJO is that it decided to forgo a display and replaced it with an ambient interface. Instead, you can easily monitor activity from afar using its accompanying mobile app. And should your network ever be attacked, a notification will be immediately sent to your smartphone with more details.

In terms of hardware, CUJO boasts 4GB of Flash memory, two 1GB Ethernet ports, 256-bit AES encryption and cryptographic hardware acceleration.

“We use bank-level security to protect the communication between your CUJO and the CUJO cloud,” its creators add. “Our device will contain several layers of hardware security, making it difficult to break into it even with direct physical access to it.”

Ready to safeguard your home devices from hackers? Head over to CUJO’s Indiegogo campaign, where the team is seeking $30,000. Delivery is expected to begin in March 2016.

Atmel launches next-generation CryptoAuthentication device

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Atmel becomes first to ship ultra-secure crypto element enabling smart, connected and secure systems.

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Just announced, the Atmel ATECC508A is the first device to integrate ECDH (Elliptic Curve Diffie–Hellman) security protocol — an ultra-secure method to provide key agreement for encryption/decryption, along with ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) sign-verify authentication — for the Internet of Things (IoT) market including home automation, industrial networking, accessory and consumable authentication, medical and mobile, among many others.

Atmel’s ATECC508A is the second integrated circuit (IC) in the CryptoAuthentication portfolio with advanced Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) capabilities. With built-in ECDH and ECDSA, this device is ideal for the rapidly growing IoT market by easily providing confidentiality, data integrity and authentication in systems with MCU or MPUs running encryption/decryption algorithms (such as AES) in software. Similar to all Atmel CryptoAuthentication products, the new ATECC508A employs ultra-secure hardware-based cryptographic key storage and cryptographic countermeasures which are more secure than software-based key storage.

This next-generation CryptoAuthentication device is compatible with any microcontroller or microprocessor on the market today including Atmel | SMART and Atmel AVR MCUs and MPUs. As with all CryptoAuthentication devices, the ATECC508A delivers extremely low-power consumption, requires only a single general purpose I/O over a wide voltage range, and available in a tiny form factor, making it ideal for a variety of applications that require longer battery life and flexible form factors.

“As a leader in security, Atmel is committed to delivering innovative secure solutions to the billions of devices to be connected in the IoT market,” explained Rob Valiton, SVP and GM of Atmel’s Automotive, Aerospace and Memory Business Units. “Atmel’s newest CryptoAuthentication IC is the first of its kind to apply hardware-based key storage to provide the full complement of security capabilities, specifically confidentiality, data integrity and authentication. We are excited to continue bringing ultra-secure crypto element solutions to a wide range of applications including IoT, wireless, consumer, medical, industrial, and automotive, among others.”

Key security features of the ATECC508A include:

• Optimized key storage and authentication
• ECDH operation using stored private key
• ECDSA (elliptic-curve digital signature algorithm) sign-verify
• Support for X.509 certificate formats
• 256-bit SHA/HMAC hardware engine
• Multilevel RNG using FIPS SP 800-90A DRBG
• Guaranteed 72-bit unique ID
• I2C and single-wire interfaces
• 2 to 5.5V operation, 150-nA standby current
• 10.5-kbit EEPROM for secret and private keys
• High-Endurance Monotonic Counters
• UDFN, SOIC, and 3-lead contact packages

In the wake of recent incidents, it is becoming increasingly clear that embedded system insecurity impacts everyone and every company. The effects of insecurity may not only be personal, such as theft of sensitive financial and medical data, but a bit more profound on the corporate level. Products can be cloned, software copied, systems tampered with and spied on, and many other things that can lead to revenue loss, increased liability, and diminished brand equity.

Data security is directly linked to how exposed the cryptographic key is to being accessed by unintended parties including hackers and cyber-criminals. The best solution to keeping the “secret key secret” is to lock it in protected hardware devices. That is exactly what this latest iteration of security devices have, are and will continue to do. They are an inexpensive, easy, and ultra-secure way to protect firmware, software, and hardware products from cloning, counterfeiting, hacking, and other malicious threats.

Interested in learning more? Discover the latest in hardware-based security here. Meanwhile, you may also want to browse through recent articles on the topic, including “Is the Internet of Things just a toy?,” “Greetings from Digitopia,” “What’s ahead this year for digital insecurity?,” and “Don’t be an ID-IoT.”

Report: Smart home devices have security flaws

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Connected home devices like cameras and thermostats can be easy targets for hackers, cybersecurity firm explains. 

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With a new breach seemingly every day, consumers are more on-guard than ever before when it comes to ensuring the security of their personal information from cyber criminals. And, rightfully so. Validating the cause for such concerns is a new report from Synack that highlights the ease in which malicious hackers can access a majority of smart home devices on the market today. Quite ironically, many of them are security gadgets — the same products that are supposed to keep you protected.

Writing for Gigaom, Stacey Higginbotham notes that the firm had conducted an in-depth analysis on a number of today’s most-popular smart home gadgets, including cameras, thermostats, smoke detectors and automation controllers. Upon reviewing 16 of these devices, researchers discovered a vast majority of them possess some serious vulnerabilities.

Colby Moore, a security analyst for Synack, told Gigaom that it took him only 20 minutes to break into all but one of the assorted devices during testing. Furthermore, the company believes the lack of security for such products could derive from the fact that there are no set standards for smart home security.

“Right now the internet of things is like computer security was in the ‘90s, when everything was new and no one had any security standards or any way to monitor their devices for security,” Moore says.

Upon finishing the investigation, Synack found the worst performing devices to be, in fact, connected cameras. Each of the five camera products examined had issues either with encryption or password security. As for thermostats, Nest was deemed to be the most secure, although it did lose points for a weak password policy. Others were cited for having problems with password policies, encryption and a long history of flaws across product lines.

Meanwhile, a number of smoke and carbon dioxide detectors didn’t fare so well either. The analyst reveals that this category could fall victim to a supply chain-based attack, meaning someone could intercept the device and change a component.

Lastly, a few of the home controllers are believed to have issues with exposed service and insecure architecture, while others lack proper password policies as well. In all, Moore shares with Gigaom that the security of smart home devices today is “abysmal.” He suggests users hardwire as many devices as possible, enable automatic firmware updates and utilize strong passwords.

“Smart homes are a dumb idea if they are not secure. And that means secure at every node,” Atmel resident security expert Bill Boldt chimed in on the matter. “Who wants a home that allows people to monitor them? There is already a website out there showing pictures of people intercepted from their own home security cameras. That is just the top of the iceberg. Nodes of all types from thermostats to cameras, to meters, appliances need to be authenticated and encrypted. Consumers will soon figure that out and demand it.”

Interested in reading more? Head over to Gigaom’s entire writeup. You can also discover how to add enhanced authentication and encryption into your next design here.