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This story began when I was giving a TV interview about a recent incident where police in the U.S. obtained a search warrant for an Amazon Echo owned by a murder suspect in the hopes that it would help convict him — or at least shed light on the case (the case is not relevant to our story, but here’s an article about it, anyway).
The day after my interview, several people told me that every time I said “Alexa” on TV (and, as you can imagine, I said it several times during that interview), their device turned on and entered a waiting-for-your-commend mode.
It took me a few seconds to grasp the meaning of what they had just told me… and then I had one of those OMG moments. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to hear. Immediately I started planning what I would say to mess with Echo owners who were unlucky enough to be watching the next time I was on TV. Actually, I don’t even need them to watch — I just need them to leave the TV on.
The death of secure physical boundaries
But there is a much greater issue here. And it relates to the fact that placing an Echo device in a physically secured environment does not actually mean that threat actors cannot access it.
The world of IoT was destined to introduce problems of a new type. And here they are.
Until now, we have (generally) divided the world into two sections: secured areas and unsecured areas. And we had straightforward means to facilitate the separation between the two: walls, barbed-wire fences, gates, guards, cameras, alarm systems, etc.
But now, devices like Alexa force us to define a new type of physical perimeter — the “vocal” perimeter.
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