this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Voice control is dangerous (infosec.pub)
submitted 5 days ago by Dave@lemmy.nz to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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This morning my kid asked the voice assistant to "Turn off the computers in this house".

I heard it, thought well that's a strange request but seems harmless because how is home assistant gonna turn off computers.

Me a little while later, "why is shit broken? What's happening!"

Turns out dumb me had adguard exposed to the voice assistant, it switched off all the adguard settings including the DNS rewriting that is the cornerstone of many of my self-hosted services.

I've since revoked that access.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 88 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

A while back, I saw a story in the Home Assistant Facebook group about someone's child saying "Hey Google, turn on everything" and it messing things up. I was telling the story to my wife and forgot to replace "Hey Google" with something Google wouldn't pick up on. Oops. It heard my "turn on everything" and chaos ensued. I have some Zigbee alarms that all started sounding. It enabled several different scenes and ran several scripts. All TVs turned on. My Xbox and Nvidia Shield were fighting for control of the TV (there's some issue with HDMI-CEC that I haven't figured out where if both are on, they get stuck in a loop changing the TV input between HDMI2 and HDMI3 about once per second).

Don't do that. "Turn off everything" is bad too. I ~~have~~ used to have my server rack plugged into a smart plug to measure power usage, and "turn off everything" turns that off. I want to figure out how to disable these two voice commands.

[–] sunbytes@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

When the voice assistant came out I remember one of my coworkers showing it off to another.

To which the other coworker just said "hey Google, text Mom saying 'you're fat'".

Because of that I've never had any voice tools connected to anything I own.

[–] Rin@lemm.ee 46 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I just want to point out that i'd highly advise against plugging in your server rack to a smart socket. Those fuckers randomly cycle. Use them for things that are usually off.

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 44 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Instead, use a UPS that has telemetry that you can read back. Bonus: it's a ups

[–] dan@upvote.au 7 points 5 days ago

Good point. I am using a UPS now so I'll get rid of the smart plug.

[–] dan@upvote.au 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm using a UPS now so I'll get rid of the smart plug. I've been using it for three years and haven't had issues with it cycling though.

[–] Rin@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

What kind do you have? If they didn't cycle randomly, i might get some for myself :D

[–] dan@upvote.au 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

My favourite ones are these ones from Sengled: https://a.co/d/9UPGMTZ

I'm in the USA so these are US-style ones. They support 1800W (which is the max for standard US outlets), use Zigbee, and are ETL certified.

[–] Rin@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

use zigbee

zigbee my beloved :D

thanks so much

[–] Zanathos@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I have Meross smart plugs and they don't cycle unexpectedly. They do use older wifi chips though and my Meross garage door opener has issues staying connected for some reason . I've not had an issue with their power plugs though, been using them for 3-4 years as well.

[–] Rin@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Only issue with wifi plugs is that they want to call home otherwise won't connect :/

[–] Zanathos@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

There is an HACS addon for Meross to make the calls all local. I haven't messed with it too much but it does work. The issue with my garage door opener is purely an issue with my Ubiquity setup and the fact it's connecting through an exterior wall.

[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Or syncing with ohmhour, forgetting, removing physical devices and smart strip, later reusing smart strip for aforementioned server, losing your mind every few days when you notice it went down for no reason but no idea why bc nothing in the software you're running is instructing it to do so.

[–] kolorafa@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago

In home assistant every entity has "assist" config, you can remove any entity from assist which in turn will prevent it from being included in "all" assist/voice target.

So you can have a plug for server without worry but need to remove it from assist.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 15 points 5 days ago

Haha it's a fine balance between preventing this sort of craziness and having a voice assistant that is actually useful because it can do things.

I want to figure out how to disable these two voice commands, and how to completely disable turning off the smart plug my server rack uses.

In the settings->voice assistants page you can see exposed entities. Review them and remove anything you don't want it to be able to control.

You can also set up custom commands as an automation. You could probably set up an automation trigger to pick up on the phrases you want to block and respond with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" (or something boring).

[–] shadshack@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Open the Google Home app, go to " Automations", and make one for the household for when someone says "turn everything on" and any other variations you want, then just make it respond with something instead of actually doing the thing.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 days ago

This sounds great until you realize the number of invocations that mean the same thing:

  • everything on
  • turn on everything
  • turn everything on
  • switch on everything
  • switch everything on
  • turn on all devices

There’s more I’m sure, but you get the point.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 4 days ago

Thanks for the explanation!

[–] Tja@programming.dev 60 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It was DNS.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 34 points 5 days ago (3 children)
[–] javiwhite@feddit.uk 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I spent a week trying to work out why my traefik instance wasn't forwarding http & Https traffic to any of my docker containers. By the fifth day I remembered that the week before I'd decided it would be a good idea to test locally before uploading to my vps, by adding my site URLs to my hosts file. (All except traefik: which meant I was able to access the dashboard and see all my routers online... I just couldn't reach any of them, with no logs for access etc... drove me insane.).

It was only until I tried accessing from my mobile that I realised what I'd done.

Should've known better, but that's the price we pay for "good ideas" at 2am.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 5 days ago

I have definitely done similar things. Now you mention it, I remember adding a hosts file entry for testing recently and can't remember if I removed it. I just checked my laptop and two servers and didn't find anything weird so now it's gonna bug me.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I heard a legend that there was a time where it wasn't true.

But then humans come up with all kinds of weird shit.

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ah, yes, there was that time - it was a time of magic when many had little education and would do strange chants to appease the gods - one example is: TurnItOff & TurnItOn

You still hear that to this day - along with the later phrase - again still used by lesser educated people: "the network's down"

Over time people came to know more and the god of networks was known as "DeNiS"

This was also popularised by songs in the 60's and 70's - esp. this version

Over time the name shortened further to what we know now: DNS

Yet no-one still knows what it means or how it came about.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

i meant literally one time

[–] cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de 66 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I half expected this post ending with HA turning itself off

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 17 points 5 days ago

I'm surprised it didn't turn off the voice assistant. It does have the ability to mute itself (for when the kids are using it when they are supposed to be doing something else or are just generally annoying).

[–] AlternateRoute@lemmy.ca 28 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I’ve since revoked that access.

A few releases ago they made it so you can DEFAULT new entities NOT to be controlled by the VA.. I cleared ALL entities and changed the setting. I only add things one at a time to voice control now.

SO many integrations ad switches it is a high risk to default the VA to have access to all new ones.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 5 days ago

I think that setting has been there as long as I've had a voice assistant (since I got my HA Voice Preview in January). I knew it existed but I let it expose them. I probably shouldn't, because I always have to review it after adding anything new since it normally doesn't get what I wanted exposed/not exposed.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That seems like a major bug if it thought DNS settings were a computer.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

It's an LLM that has access to run commands. It's a major bug by design 😅. But it does do a decent job if I keep tweaking after thing kind of thing happens.

Without the LLM you have to phrase things very specifically, or it will say it doesn't understand. With the LLM the kids can do things like ask for "the song that goes [lyrics here]" and it can play it. It's a very cool thing to play with, e.g. "can you tell me what the weather will be like today, phrased as a haiku", but it's full of traps as well. I have a "Home Assistant Voice Preview", the "Preview" bit is to make it clear this is not ready for the general public yet 🙂

P.S. if you're wondering, the weather today:

Showers grace the sky,
Rain will fall, then clear away,
Gentle winds will sigh.

[–] MoonRaven@feddit.nl 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Might be a good idea to expose things through a reverse proxy if this is web interfaces. I have *.local.domain.nexus all pointed to my reverse proxy's internal ip address and the reverse proxy makes everything available through https.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 4 points 4 days ago

Everything is exposed through a reverse proxy. E.g. homeassistant.mydomain.nz

However, I have DNS rewriting set in Adguard that does *.mydomain.nz -> 192.168.1.XX

This means a) things don't need to go external if I'm at home, and b) I have many things only accessible internally, which rely on this otherwise they won't work at all.

It's all HTTPS, I just use a cloudflare integration in Traefik to do the Let's Encrypt validation for domains not accessible externally.

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

just be thankfull that you don't host lemmy.nz at home @Dave@lemmy.nz

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 5 days ago

Haha I guess I should be grateful for that, though I do host another dozen or more services at home so a lot of things broke!