1) Home Assistant is not an officially sanctioned option by the devices and will run into technical issues regardless whether it's cloud hosted or not (as seen by the very post we're all commenting on).
2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists.
There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
> Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system
Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat):
> The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance.
> Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component.
> The source code is available on GitHub:
> SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer
> hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant
I suppose the vendor could sell a home server device, which runs some kind of Tailscale-like technology to make it available from the internet, and the app talks to that locally hosted server.
colinmorelli|2 years ago
2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists.
There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
lloeki|2 years ago
Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat):
> The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance.
> Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component.
> The source code is available on GitHub:
> SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer
> hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant
https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works
https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security
dthul|2 years ago