May 2020 Posts

One of the big missing pieces from my conversion to Home Assistant was Amazon Alexa integration. It wasn’t something we used a lot, but it was a nice to have. Especially for walking out a room and saying “Alexa, turn off the living room lights.” I had been putting it off a bit because the setup instructions are rather complex. But this weekend I found myself with a couple free hours and decided to work through it. It actually wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be, but it is definitely not the type of thing a beginner or someone who does not have some programming and sysadmin background could accomplish. But in working through it, there was one thing that was an immediate red flag for me: the need to expose your Home Assistant installation to the Internet. It makes sense that you would need to do this - the Amazon mothership needs to send data to you to take an action after all. But exposing my entire home automation system to the Internet seems like a really, really bad idea. So in doing this, rather than expose port 443 on my router to the Internet and open my entire home to a Shodan attack, I decided to try something a bit different.