Amazon Sidewalk expands your network area, but security is already relevant

At its Alexa event on Wednesday Amazon announced a new low bandwidth network called the Amazon Sidewalk that can extend the range to control your devices beyond what Bluetooth and Wi-Fi currently allow.

The Amazon Sidewalk drops the 900 MHz band to the radio spectrum ̵[ads1]1; usually used for amateur radio – to expand the distance at which you can control smart home devices, said Dave Limp, senior vice president for devices and services during the event. This can have many consequences for smart gardens, outdoor lighting and mailbox sensors.

Amazon launched the protocol for the network on Wednesday, but its availability is not yet known. The company has completed a test deployment with 700 Amazon employees in the Los Angeles area, Limp said during the event: Sidewalk nodes throw a signal as far as a mile, and combine to connect most of the city.

With the Amazon Sidewalk, the tech giant is addressing a market need, said Forrester analyst Jeff Pollard. However, the network also presents several security issues.

"The first concern is really about what all the devices connected to the Sidewalk collect," Pollard said. "If use cases like home automation or IoT devices use this technology, they generate telemetry data. Connected devices – especially in the home – provide huge amounts of information about your behavior and activities, which can also go to Amazon with that connection." [19659005] For example, anything a connected device to communicate back to a management console or a support manufacturer could be "readable" by Amazon – something the company had not seen before, Pollard said.

It may also be possible for Amazon and others to use the network to identify individuals, said Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University.

"Generally, signals can be used by third parties with specialized equipment to identify devices and movement of these devices across regions," Kirda said. Each time a company offers a service that involves wireless signals – think T-Mobile or Google Fi – they can also track user geolocation and use that information to improve the quality of the service. However, it can also be used for advertising targeting, Kirda said.

Amazon will have to consider how users will authenticate, what encryption to use, and how easy or difficult it will be for third parties to access Sidewalk, or to use signals to find devices and users, Kirda says .

Amazon also announced a smart dog brand coming next year, called Fetch . If your dog ever runs away, you will be able to use the Amazon Sidewalk network to find them. The idea is that if the sidewalk becomes a popular protocol, devices in the neighbor's home can retrieve the dog's pickup so you can track it outside your yard. You know when you dog bolts, but will also be able to see where he is gone.

But even Fetch raises potential security flaws, Pollard said. "It's great to get a notification that your dog is leaving the yard, but these devices can also send data to Amazon like the frequency, duration, destination and path of your dog walks," he said. "It seems innocent enough, but what can this data mean to you when combined with other data? It's the unintended – and unexpected – consequences of technology and the data they collect that often come back to bite us (excuse the pun). "

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Originally published September 25 at 11.19 pm PT.
Update, 11.24 am PT: Adds more information. Update, September 26 at 12:30. PT: Adds comments to security analysts.