Monitor your Smart Home Gizmos with IoT inspector

A web app which is currently available only for Mac OS is yet to arrive for Windows and Linux

Do you know how actively your Smart Home devices are performing? All this while it was really difficult for us to monitor the performance of Smart home devices but now Apple users can easily do it. Yes, currently I am talking only about Apple users because the app is not available for other OS users like Windows or Linux.

Very recently researchers of Princeton University have built an app for the web part that can help you to spy on your Smart Home appliances. The app has been named as IoT inspector.

So, what do you think about the purpose of building such an app?

According to the researchers, building an open tool can help you to analyze how the gizmos are connected with the network and whether data are leaked with the third party. And in case of data is leaking such app can actually let you know how much data has been leaked by the gadgets.

What researchers found while testing the open source tool?

While testing the IOT inspector tool researcher found one Chromecast repetitively tried contacting the Google server even while not in use actively.

Not only that, but a Geeni Smart bulb was also found to communicate constantly with the cloud through a website called tuyaus.com which is owned by a Chinese company.

There are other ways as well for tracking such kind of devices but to operate such things requires technical expertise, so common people might find it difficult to operate it without technical knowledge. But since it doesn’t require any complex set up or special kind of hardware it is easy to handle.

But this app cannot be opened in all the browsers. It is compliance only with Firefox and Google Chrome. The researchers are basically studying all kinds of risks that are attached to the IoT device. So, those who are willing to use this app need to be a part of their research work.

However, if anyone is planning to run this tool need to read the FAQ clearly for spying on network traffic. Although the tool will not disclose the IP address or your location it can reveal the name (can be your real name) you are using for operating the smart devices. So, it is necessary to read the FAQ in details.

This tool focuses mainly on smart home appliances and not meant to spy on your mobile phones, tablets or laptops. In case, you want to exclude any device from your spying list you can do that manually.

In total 50 smart devices can be monitored using IoT inspector and if the number of devices exceeds, you can contact the researcher for increasing the limitation.

So, what are you thinking of? Start monitoring your Smart Home Devices using IoT Inspector and don’t forget to read the FAQ before purchasing it.