Another day, another Internet widget dissected. This time its the Kankun smart plug. Now with English APP. For between $10-$20 you can make any electrical outlet in your home into a smart one, and turn it off via the power of the Internet!
Sounds easy. And there was some Eglish’s good clicky here! in the app.
So the usual process. Bring it up in a closed environment. Try to ssh/telnet/web in w/ the usual passwords. Here I was able to ssh in without trouble. And find lots of info online (e.g. here).
But what no one mentioned is the ‘calling home’ bit. It looks up ‘wis.huafeng.com’ and does some UDP activity there. A bit of firewall, a bit of DNS etc, and that is gone. (no Internet is needed so just blocked that, no outbound is needed from it, so blocked that too). I suspect (?) its so that I can control it from anywhere in the world. Or that someone can. Neither seemed needed.
A bit more work and I was able to compile and upload my own OpenWRT from source, so that risk is gone.
But its amazing for ~$10 you can get a widget, delivered to your home, which has enough ram/flash to run a decent linux (OpenWRT). And control your lamps. What an age we live in.
They have a video (for a similar model) here, i’ll let you eyeball it before you place the big order.
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