We believe in a “connected” service where local capabilities in the hub are meant to improve perfor-
mance and insulate the customer from intermittent internet outages. We do not plan to support a
perpetually disconnected mode.
We made the decision to limit SmartApps to the Cloud in our first release because it allowed us to
focus on the experience of writing the applications and less on the mechanics of deploying that logic
locally to the hub.
That said, we are actively considering implementation scenarios whereby we can distribute Smar-
tApps to—and execute SmartApps locally on—the SmartThings Hub.
In all cases, we recognize the critical scenarios where a loss of communications with the Smart-
Things Cloud could have a degrading impact on critical, local use cases, and are being deeply
thoughtful on how we minimize the risk of disruption.We hope that SmartThings and other influential IoT device manufacturers continue to
make efforts to design local and disconnected capabilities securely. Their recognition of the
risk of critical scenarios arising from a loss of communications is laudable, and they are tak-
ing the right approach. However, we’ve seen in previous chapters how reliance on the local
network as inherently secure can lead to a high probability of disruption and compromise of
our privacy and security. As we look into the future, we ought to demand secure design as an
intention, not a side effect. It would be a shame if the architecture designed to support critical
functionality in times of a communication disruption were vulnerable to attacks when the
communication channel is available.
Companies like SmartThings are leading innovation that will help us enable the IoT in
our homes. We are also going to increasingly depend upon these devices for our well-being
and for our safety. IoT device manufacturers and consumers ought to think more carefully
about secure authentication, trustworthiness of communications, and secure interoperability
among devices.
CHAPTER 4: BLURRED LINES—WHEN THE PHYSICAL SPACE MEETS THE VIRTUAL(^120) SPACE