An open sources research tool can spy on the smart home appliances

The Princeton University researchers have reportedly built a cutting edge web application that will help the people to keep tabs on their smart home devices. By the looks of it, this feature is extremely beneficial for the Internet of Things devices as they are becoming a target for the attackers from around the globe.

The name of the open source tool is IoT Inspector, and the name of the tool does add a nice ring to it. By the looks of it, the tool is currently available for Apple's Mac Operating System. On the other hand, the website of IoT Inspector tool suggests that the developers are soon going to unveil the Windows and Linux version of this tool.

The researchers even curated a blog which showcases the aim of the tool. According to the blog, the tool offers an intuitively simple tool that the consumers can utilize for analyzing their connected devices' network traffic. The aim of the tool is to provide an ability to the users to ensure that the devices such as robot vacuum and smart speakers are not sharing their data with any third party. Additionally, the tool is going to convey the users if their devices are snitching the data on the internet or not.

For instance, the researchers conducted a test with the IoT Inspector in a lab. The researchers said that the Chromecast device was continually contacting Google's server even when it was not active. By the looks of it, a smart bulb from Geeni was also communicating with the cloud by sending and receiving traffic all through tuyaus.com. One of the best features of the tool is that it doesn't have an essential requirement. And this also means there is no need for any specialized hardware to run the tool.

**This post was published on https://techcrunch.com