Smart Home Security

The eFon Technology is one of the notable firms in Taiwan which provides home security solution for their customers. For years, eFon technology keeps the security of their customers as top priority. Today, they benefits several people throughout the region of Taiwan with an absolute home security solution ensuring as safe and secure as possible. They have developed the edge product with all the sensors needed for monitoring the Temperature, Humidity, Co2, Smoke and a few more critical information. They build actuators to control the Door & Windows. In 2018, eFon technology began using Bevywise MQTT Broker to act as a middleware & to collect data from their edge device for their home security systems. The use of MQTT here has been so successful & this IoT use case has benefited the eFon technology in providing a perfect smart home security solutions to their customers.

Smart Home Security Solution – Why MQTT?

There is an increasing need for the Smart Home security system in today’s world. Hence IoT home security system with camera is gaining more adoption as it can create instant alerts to users anywhere over the internet. The system also helps you control your appliance in home remotely. An article in “A Secure Life” outlines the top 10 reasons why you should have a IoT Home security system.

Interlinking & managing home security systems can be made achievable using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. In today’s connected world, while there are many internet protocols, MQTT is often used in smart home security hubs. This is because, MQTT is uniquely designed for automation. In easy words, we need a communication protocol when we need to communicate between connected devices and controller & MQTT does that. This is because, its a light weight protocol, which has a very low footprint to send and receive data. So it uses very less amount of data to send and receive information. Therefore, MQTT is the best for smart home security systems.

Also, home security systems are highly expected to provide high standards & sophistications. Here are some critical factors that every home security system should have

• Secure data transfer – Security is decisive in today’s world. If any intruder breaches such IoT connected security system, it pave the way for them to spy or rob homes.
• Reliability and Flexibility – Another critical factor in home security systems is that connectivity should remain reliable and available.

By focusing on above challenges, you may ask ‘How MQTT solves this?’. The thing is, even though there is no security options built inside MQTT, it provides some security protection & shield. The protocol enables client authentication which permits a two-side hand shake. If the connected device supports SSL/TLS, then this technique allows for encryption of data in the message. The give & take authentication and encryption could prevent intruders and man-in-the middle attacks. This is how MQTT provides a secured data transmission. And also, MQTT is frequently used to master the gap between different protocols, so that different devices can communicate with each other even if they do not communicate using the same protocol. Coming to reliability, MQTT’s lightweight design, publish/subscribe method and quality of service levels deals with the reliability and efficiency requirements for home security systems.

Challenges they faced

The eFon technology need to differentiate themselves with unique offerings in order to retain customers in a competitive market.

It includes,

• Security system should serve multiple customers.
• A dashboard for each user that can generate alarm and alert based on their own threshold value.
• User interface that speaks their own language & also live CCTV video streaming.
• Integrate UI with social platform.

Finally, eFon Technology need a complete MQTT server with embedded security, reliability & flexible functionalities along with the above mentioned sophistication.

Solutions we provided

As mentioned earlier, the eFon Technology has their own edge device with all the sensors needed. They use Bevywise MQTT Broker to collect data from their sensors by connecting it to the gateway. They were able to push the data based on the sensors to the dashboard and create rules to show alerts based on received values. Bevywise MQTT Broker comes up with the custom store option which was leveraged and integrated with the Social Platform with a two way handshake model. It helps them push the data to the Social application hosted separately. The Social application stores the mapping between the User gateway and the customer login to provide the corresponding alerts. In addition, MQTT broker supports running it as a service & hence they were able to host it as a service on the Alibaba cloud to run it parallel to our Platform.

MQTT Broker also supports users working with their native-language. This helps them have UI which speaks their local language.