The Guardian Project, a Tor Project contributor, has developed a way to keep the army of devices from toasters and refrigerators to lawnsprinklers and HVAC systems, from rising up at the behest of hackers and spilling sensitive data or executing other cyber attacks, by integrating Tor security into the Internet of Things.
Working with Home Assistant, an open source platform built on Python, Guardian Project Director Nathan Freitas was able to create the “Tor Onion Service Configuration” for the scalable system. The platform, which runs on devices including Raspberry Pi, can control and network IoT. The new "Tor Onion Service Configuration" setup is available on Home Assistant's website.
"Too many 'Things' in our homes, at our hospitals, in our businesses and throughout our lives are exposed to the public Internet without the ability to protect their communication. Tor provides this, for free, with real-world hardended, open-source software and strong, state of the art cryptography," Freitas said in a release.
Tor Project Executive Director Shari Steele said she was “excited about the potential of this new use for Tor's technology.”
Pointing to the real threat of attacks coming through devices like lighting and baby cams, Tor, the release said, has created a privacy buffer "between the baby and the Internet" so that the baby isn't exposed to the open Internet. Attackers face a global network of thousands of Tor nodes instead of a single point of failure.
