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I Moved My Smart Home to a Dedicated VLAN, and Here’s What We Learned

We’ve been increasingly concerned about the security of our smart home devices. The sheer number of connected devices – lights, thermostats, cameras, even our refrigerator – presented a growing attack surface. Every IoT device represents a potential entry point for malicious actors to gain access to our network. As such, we embarked on a journey to isolate our smart home devices on a dedicated VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network). This article details our experience, the challenges we faced, and the solutions we implemented, with the ultimate goal of improving the security and privacy of our home network.

Why Isolate Your Smart Home Devices on a VLAN?

The primary motivation behind segmenting smart home devices onto a separate VLAN is enhanced security. Most IoT devices aren’t known for their robust security features. They often run outdated software, have weak default passwords, and are rarely updated with security patches. By isolating these devices on their own network segment, we prevent them from directly accessing our more sensitive devices, such as computers, laptops, and smartphones, which contain personal data and financial information.

A dedicated VLAN also limits the impact of a potential breach. If a smart home device is compromised, the attacker’s access is confined to the VLAN. They cannot easily pivot to other parts of our network to steal data or install malware.

Another compelling reason is network performance. Smart home devices often generate a considerable amount of network traffic, constantly communicating with cloud services and each other. By isolating them on a separate VLAN, we can prevent them from consuming bandwidth and potentially interfering with the performance of other critical applications on our primary network. In our experience, this resulted in measurable improvements in gaming latency and video streaming quality.

Planning the VLAN Implementation: Our Initial Considerations

Before diving into the technical aspects of setting up the VLAN, we carefully considered the existing network infrastructure and the specific requirements of our smart home devices.

Identifying Smart Home Devices

The first step was to catalog all smart home devices connected to our network. This included:

  • Smart lights (Philips Hue, LIFX)
  • Smart thermostats (Nest, Ecobee)
  • Smart cameras (Arlo, Ring, Wyze)
  • Smart speakers (Amazon Echo, Google Home)
  • Smart appliances (Samsung, LG)
  • Smart hubs (Samsung SmartThings, Hubitat)

We documented each device’s manufacturer, model number, and current IP address. This inventory proved invaluable during the configuration process.

Network Infrastructure Requirements

We assessed our existing network infrastructure to ensure it supported VLANs. This required:

  • A VLAN-capable router: Most modern routers designed for home or small business use support VLANs. We used a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.
  • Managed switches (optional but recommended): Managed switches allow for finer-grained control over VLAN traffic and port assignments. We added a TP-Link TL-SG108E smart switch.
  • Wireless access points (WAPs) that support multiple SSIDs: If using Wi-Fi for smart home devices, the WAP must support assigning different SSIDs to different VLANs. We leveraged the Ubiquiti UniFi AC Pro access point, which offers extensive VLAN and SSID customization options.

DHCP and IP Addressing

We planned a separate IP address range for the smart home VLAN. We chose a non-overlapping subnet (192.168.2.0/24) to avoid conflicts with our primary network (192.168.1.0/24). We also configured the router’s DHCP server to assign IP addresses within this range to devices connected to the smart home VLAN.

Firewall Rules and Inter-VLAN Routing

A crucial aspect of VLAN implementation is configuring firewall rules to control traffic between VLANs. We initially blocked all traffic from the smart home VLAN to our primary network to ensure maximum isolation. We then selectively opened specific ports and protocols as needed for certain devices to function correctly. This is a critical step, and improper configuration can render some smart devices unusable.

The Implementation: Step-by-Step Configuration

With our planning complete, we moved on to the actual implementation of the VLAN. This involved configuring the router, switches, and wireless access points.

Router Configuration

We accessed the router’s web interface and navigated to the VLAN configuration section. The specific steps vary depending on the router model, but the general process involves:

  1. Creating a new VLAN: We assigned a VLAN ID (e.g., VLAN 20) and a name (e.g., “SmartHome”) to the new VLAN.
  2. Assigning an IP address to the VLAN interface: We configured the router’s interface associated with the VLAN with an IP address within the chosen subnet (e.g., 192.168.2.1).
  3. Configuring the DHCP server: We enabled the DHCP server for the VLAN and configured it to assign IP addresses within the 192.168.2.0/24 range. We also set the DNS server address (typically the router’s IP address or a public DNS server like Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4)).
  4. Creating firewall rules: This is the most critical step. We created a rule to block all traffic from the SmartHome VLAN to the primary network. We then created more specific rules to allow necessary traffic, as described below.

Switch Configuration (if applicable)

If using managed switches, we configured the ports connected to the smart home devices to be members of the SmartHome VLAN. This typically involves:

  1. Accessing the switch’s web interface.
  2. Configuring VLAN membership for each port: We assigned the ports connected to the smart home devices to VLAN 20 (SmartHome).
  3. Setting the port mode to “access” or “untagged”: This tells the switch to remove the VLAN tag from packets entering the port and add the VLAN tag to packets leaving the port.

Wireless Access Point (WAP) Configuration

We configured our WAP to broadcast a separate SSID for the smart home devices. This allowed us to connect the devices to the correct VLAN over Wi-Fi. The process involves:

  1. Creating a new SSID: We created a new SSID specifically for smart home devices (e.g., “SmartHomeWiFi”).
  2. Assigning the SSID to the SmartHome VLAN: We associated the new SSID with VLAN 20.
  3. Configuring the Wi-Fi security settings: We set a strong password for the SSID using WPA2 or WPA3 encryption.
  4. Connecting Smart Devices to the new SmartHomeWiFi SSID.

The Challenges and Solutions: What Broke and How We Fixed It

As the spoiler mentioned, quite a bit broke during the migration. Here’s a breakdown of the issues we encountered and the solutions we implemented.

Device Discovery Issues

Many smart home devices rely on broadcast or multicast protocols for device discovery. Because these protocols typically don’t cross VLAN boundaries, devices on the primary network were unable to discover devices on the SmartHome VLAN, and vice versa.

Solution: We implemented mDNS (Multicast DNS) reflector using avahi-daemon on a Raspberry Pi connected to both VLANs. This allows mDNS traffic to be forwarded between the VLANs, enabling device discovery. For example:

  1. Install avahi-daemon:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install avahi-daemon
  1. Configure avahi-daemon to reflect mDNS:
sudo nano /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf

Make sure the following are enabled in the config file:

[reflector]
enable-reflector=yes
reflect-ipv=yes

Restart the avahi service:

sudo systemctl restart avahi-daemon

Alternatively, if our router supported it, we could have used its built-in mDNS reflector functionality.

Cloud Connectivity Issues

Some smart home devices require direct access to the internet to function correctly. While we allowed internet access from the SmartHome VLAN, some devices still failed to connect.

Solution: We investigated the firewall logs and discovered that the devices were attempting to connect to specific ports that were blocked by our default firewall rules. We then created allow rules for those specific ports and protocols in the firewall. Example: Smart device failed on port 8883. Then we use:

iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -p tcp --dport 8883 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -p tcp --sport 8883 -j ACCEPT

Mobile App Connectivity

Our mobile apps, used to control the smart home devices, were unable to connect to the devices on the SmartHome VLAN because our phones were connected to the primary network.

Solution: We implemented a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server on our router. This allows us to connect our phones to the SmartHome VLAN remotely, as if they were physically connected to the network. We used OpenVPN for this purpose. An alternative solution would be creating firewall rules to allow traffic from the primary network to specific devices in the SmartHome VLAN, but this would negate some of the security benefits of VLAN isolation.

  • Install OpenVPN on the server (typically the router or a dedicated server).
  • Configure OpenVPN with a strong encryption algorithm and authentication method.
  • Generate client configuration files for each mobile device.
  • Install the OpenVPN client on each mobile device.

Hub Communication Problems

We use a Samsung SmartThings hub to control some of our Zigbee and Z-Wave devices. The hub, located on the SmartHome VLAN, was unable to communicate with our primary network devices.

Solution: We created specific firewall rules to allow communication between the SmartThings hub and the devices on the primary network that needed to interact with it. For example, we allowed traffic from the hub to our Plex media server, which integrates with SmartThings for home automation. We also utilized the iptables command for more fine grained control over the firewall.

iptables -A FORWARD -i SmartHomeVLAN -o PrimaryNetwork -p tcp --dport 32400 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i PrimaryNetwork -o SmartHomeVLAN -p tcp --sport 32400 -j ACCEPT

Printer Access

After the migration, our smart devices could not print to our network printer.

Solution: We discovered the printer was connected to the primary network. We moved the printer to the SmartHome VLAN, and then allowed connections to the printer port across the VLAN from our primary network.

Voice Assistant Integration

Our Amazon Echo devices, connected to the SmartHome VLAN, were unable to control devices on our primary network, such as our smart TV.

Solution: We leveraged the Alexa Skills Kit to create a custom skill that acted as a bridge between the two networks. This skill ran on a server on our primary network and communicated with the Alexa devices on the SmartHome VLAN via secure API calls. We implemented this using Node-RED.

Ongoing Maintenance and Monitoring

After the initial implementation, we established a plan for ongoing maintenance and monitoring.

Regular Security Audits

We regularly review our firewall rules and security settings to ensure they remain effective and up-to-date. We also scan our smart home devices for vulnerabilities using tools like Nmap and Nessus.

Firmware Updates

We make sure to update the firmware on all our smart home devices as soon as updates are available. This helps to patch security vulnerabilities and improve device performance. We have setup automated notifications for firmware updates where possible.

Log Analysis

We continuously monitor our network logs for suspicious activity. This allows us to detect and respond to potential security threats in a timely manner. We implemented a centralized logging system using Graylog to collect and analyze logs from all our network devices.

Conclusion: Was It Worth It?

Moving our smart home devices to a dedicated VLAN was a challenging but ultimately worthwhile endeavor. While we encountered several obstacles along the way, we were able to overcome them with careful planning, diligent troubleshooting, and a willingness to experiment. The enhanced security and improved network performance provide us with peace of mind and a more enjoyable smart home experience. While the initial setup requires technical expertise, the long-term benefits in terms of security and network management are substantial. We highly recommend considering VLAN isolation for anyone serious about securing their smart home.

Finally, by creating a Magisk Module that enables the described mDNS reflector functionality, you could dramatically simplify the initial setup process for other users, providing a valuable contribution to the Magisk Module Repository. This would further enhance the appeal of your website, Magisk Modules, and establish it as a resource for advanced Android customization and network security.

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