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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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Your Https connections are also symmetric, so that's a silly thing to dislike.
The handshake and key exchange are asymmetric, and used to establish a symmetric session key.
ZigBee encryption is fine for the use case, because you're only adding devices you know are being added. You inherently trust that your physical ZigBee device is the device it claims to be.
There's potentially an opportunity to hijack the key exchange between devices at network join, but you'd have to approve the listening device to your network in the first place.
https://development.libelium.com/zigbee-networking-guide/security-and-data-encryption
Thank you for clarifying, and my apologies
No apology needed, one thing about security is that paranoia is good. One problem with security is that paranoia leads to assumptions and misinformation, rather than understanding.
Symmetric key encryption is much faster than asymmetric, and can use much larger keys with less compute penalty. So we use acPU intensive asymmetric TLS handshakes to safely exchange the keys, and then switch to the faster method for the data.
So when ZigBee use AES 128, you can be reasonably sure the data packets are safe. The next question to ask is "do they exchange their keys safely?"
Which in this case would be "no" if you just leave the ZigBee controller in pairing mode all the time. However, you only allow pairing when you want it, and only pair with devices you explicitly allow. Unauthorized devices never get your network key.
Could you tell me more about how secure the key exchange is?
Check the link I posted above, or you can look at the 802.15.4 wiki for an overview.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15.4, scroll to the security section.
Thanks