Apple’s Siri hacked to control thermostat

Siri, Apple’s iPhone ‘personal assistant’, has been hacked so that it can now be used to control a domestic thermostat. 

 

By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor

The development comes after the release of an instruction manual that software developers can use to get inside Apple’s Siri technology and modify it for their own purposes.

Web developer Pete Lamonica spent five days getting the artificially intelligent personal assistant to interact with the software that controls his heating system’s thermostat. Now he can control the temperature remotely simply by using his iPhone 4S to lower or raise it.

Lamonica, a member of St Louis-based hacker group Arch Reactor, told Wired “I’ve done some stuff with the thermostat before, such as having it log temperatures. It has a developer API which makes it very easy to work with.”

Lamonica said that the main reason he developed this Siri proxy was to increase the number of objects Siri can handle. Currently the technology is limited to sending text messages and searching the web, while in America it can also handle maps and directions.

Voice control is becoming increasingly important, with Google adding an enhanced version to its new iPad search app as well as embedding it further into its Android phones. While Google is encouraging developers to use its voice technology, Apple is currently keeping its version closed to third parties.

The original hack was discovered by Applidium, a French mobile software company that reverse-engineered the protocol Siri uses to communicate with its servers. The firm found a way to intercept and decrypt the data by forging security certificates, allowing a detailed examination of the data format.


However, the requests include a unique "key" for each iPhone 4S. To exploit the flaw, each device would have to find a way to impersonate Apple's new smartphone, Applidium said.


Any third party app offering unauthorised access to the Siri server could be quite easily blocked by Apple because all its users would probably have to use the same key. Lamonica said he wanted to improve the technology so that it works when a user says "I'm cold" rather than issues an instruction to change the temperatuire.