Security News > 2021 > June > Amazon Sidewalk Poised to Sweep You Into Its Mesh

Amazon initially announced Sidewalk in September 2019, describing it as a "New, long-term effort to greatly extend the working range of low-bandwidth, low-power, smart lights, sensors, and other low-cost devices customers install at the edge of their home network." While Sidewalk has been in the works for a few years, the news of the June 8 deadline for turning it on seems to have caught many by surprise: It gives consumers just a week to learn about the initiative and to opt out if they so choose.

As Amazon describes it, Sidewalk will do things like keep motion alerts from security cameras coming even when the Wi-Fi goes down; will stretch Wi-Fi out to smart lights at the edge of your driveway; and could act like Tile tags to help customers find pets and valuables.

Amazon is going to be running Sidewalk with its own, new Wi-Fi protocol, which uses the 900 MHz spectrum.

The Sidewalk Network Layer protects the endpoint's Sidewalk packet over the air.

Plaintext data in this layer is accessible only to the GW and the SNS. "This approach to encryption means that Amazon will not be able to interpret the contents of commands or messages sent through Sidewalk by third party services or endpoints," according to Amazon's white paper.

"This feels [like] a real novelty to me. It makes sense - if an or Alexa or whatever gets stolen, you can blacklist it centrally and it can never use Sidewalk again. But they will be able to block-list any device they don't like the look of - I'm guessing that if anyone attempts to pull Sidewalk certificates out of valid devices to impersonate them, that will be an immediate block-list add. Sidewalk isn't Amazon's network - they're not paying for the local data, etc. - but it's their rules, and they'll be able to kick anyone off they like."

News URL

https://threatpost.com/amazon-sidewalk-to-sweep-you-into-its-mesh/166581/