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But what's the alternative? Unsafe home network where one rogue device can act as a tunnel for bad actors(bots more often tbh)?


The alternative is roughly what google called BeyondCorp — not trusting your network and doing explicit auth everywhere it matters, maybe with a sprinkle of Tailscale to simplify auth and encryption.

If you're worried about your network being saturated for DDoS by a random IoT device, I suspect you'll notice it even without explicit monitoring.

Besides, risks need to be weighed by their probabilities. It's a small chance of name-brand IoT devices "going rogue" vs the certainty of random things not working when they should, and I don't think this tradeoff leans towards VLANs for most people.


If you buy devices from trustworthy brands and replace them when they stop getting security updates, it should be fine, right? After all, aren't 99% of home networks 'unsafe' according to your definition?


>After all, aren't 99% of home networks 'unsafe' according to your definition?

Prevailance of home ip addresses in DDoS attacks and in proxy pools does suggest so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


It doesn't follow. There are a lot of homes, so even if 1% of all home networks had "rogue" devices in them they'd dominate DDoS attacks. Besides, it's not HomePods or Withings smart scales or Hue bridges doing that as far as I'm aware, it's mostly cheap, unsupported, noname crap, so you can reduce your risks substantially by not buying questionable products.


There are plenty of CVEs in brand name things across IoT spectrum.

Vetting devices you introduce to network is of course solid advice, but a little bit of paranoia never hurts in tech.


How many of those get exploited on firewalled networks before they're remotely patched though?

My whole point above that it does actively hurt, with devices randomly misbehaving at exactly wrong times. It's not enough to set up everything once because devices get updated and change ports, domains, and protocols. It also makes everything more brittle, requiring multiple inter-VLAN proxies to be running at all times for seemingly unrelated devices to work. That SD card in your raspi died? You decided to update Docker on it and run into problems? No Sonos for anyone in the house until it's fixed.

There's a real cost to that paranoia, it's just another case of security/convenience tradeoff.


Let's agree to disagree, I think in the end it comes down to priorities and pain threshold for having to tinker with stuff.




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