As the official Matter launch approaches, questions about the new connected device standard remain. For example, how will security be handled? How easy will it be to switch smart home ecosystems with Matter devices? What do developers need to know in order to support Matter?
We got answers to these and other Matter questions from industry leaders during a Silicon Labs webinar this week, on a panel hosted by Stacey. The panelists included Chris DeCenzo from Amazon, Michele Turner from Google, Mike Nelson from DigiCert, Karl Jonsson from Wemo, Makarand Joshi from Schneider Electric, Rob Alexander from Silicon Labs, and finally, Michelle Mindala-Freeman representing the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which leads the Matter initiative.
If you’ve been following the development of Matter as we have, you already know what the standard’s goal is: getting connected devices from different brands and platforms to seamlessly work together. That means you could use a Matter-certified Amazon device with Google Home, for example, or bring Google devices into a HomeKit environment.
And that will be good for consumers, as such cross-platform support will reduce confusion related to both device purchases and installation. It will also be good for developers, because they will have to build to one just standard instead of to multiple standards, like they do for the big vendors. Although as we saw in the panel, device makers will still need to tweak their software to work optimally with Google or, in some cases, to work with Alexa.
How is Matter security implemented?
So what did we learn? First up, we got a lot of new information about how the Matter standard will handle security. Turns out it’s not that different from how connected hardware is currently kept secure, and is similar to how web security has been enabled for years.
As Mike Nelson from DigiCert explained, all Matter devices will have a unique identifier, similar to a website domain name or IP address. And like a website, Matter devices will work with certificates that verify the device type and brand. So you’ll know that you have an “authentic” device that isn’t posing as some malware-infested bot. Each Matter device that communicates with other Matter devices will also know that both are what they say they are.
Matter will rely on PKI, or public key infrastructure, to manage the certificates. The certificate data will be stored on a secure enclave, which is a protected, secure chip. Best of all, Matter-certified devices will encrypt all data running through them, both in transit and at rest. These days, most smart home products we recommend do the same, but it took a few years to get to this point. With Matter, your data will be encrypted by default.
What’s a Matter controller and why will I need one?
In this day and age of smart homes, most people are familiar with the concept of a hub. Think of it like the “brains” of your smart home, responsible for managing device communications, automations, remote access, and any other processing tasks as required.
While there will be standard Matter devices — think lights, locks, and sensors — they won’t be Matter controllers. Controllers will be like the smart speakers and smart displays of today. In fact, Amazon and Google have already announced that some of their existing speakers and devices, such as Wi-Fi routers and displays, will be upgraded to Matter controllers.
So you may not need to buy a new Matter controller to act as a hub. Instead, your existing hub might gain Matter controller functionality. These hubs will run routines, handle the local communications between all of the Matter devices on a network, and will likely act as a bridge for low-power Thread devices to hop over to a Wi-Fi network.
While a home can have multiple controllers and those controllers can come from different vendors, they may not communicate with each other once Matter arrives. That feature is still under discussion.
What changes for developers and device makers with Matter?
For some device makers, little will change, as Matter will be handled at the application layer. However, connected devices that don’t currently have some type of secure enclave hardware may not be upgradable to Matter. But new iterations of those products will include this trusted silicon.
In terms of radio connectivity, Matter communicates over Wi-Fi or Thread, with Bluetooth still around for device setup capabilities. Which doesn’t mean smart home devices that use Zigbee, Z-Wave, or some other radio protocol won’t support Matter. It does, however, mean that Matter bridges will be needed to support them. Indeed, Ikea this week announced its own bridge, which will connect its current Tradfri line of products with Matter devices.
Developers won’t have to completely learn a whole new stack to support Matter, as much of what they may know from Zigbee device profiles will be carried over to Matter. In the meantime, the platform companies are building APIs to assist with the Matter app experience; earlier this month, Google announced Matter API support to ease the developer transition, for example. The open source Matter code repository is also available for any developer to view on GitHub.
When you move a Matter device from one platform to another, will it work exactly the same?
Another open question about Matter devices is whether or not they will keep all of their existing functionality if users switch from Google Home to Apple HomeKit, for example, or from HomeKit to Alexa. And there’s no perfectly clear answer — yet.
While the Matter standard will expose all of a device’s capabilities and states to other devices, specific features not covered by Matter may not carry over during a platform switch. That means a Matter-certified smart plug that measures energy consumption might only share its on/off capabilities with Matter devices, as energy consumption information isn’t yet supported by the Matter standard.
Which makes sense. If Amazon created a feature for a light that HomeKit didn’t support, for example, how would your HomeKit home know how to use it?
That may change going forward and if so, a majority of features should still work. However, device brands and app makers will have to communicate which features, if any, will be lost (or gained) when moving a Matter device to a different ecosystem.
There’s a final issue worth mentioning. Matter will enable local control of devices through third-party controllers, which means we could see the launch of devices that work with Matter and that don’t require an app to operate. During the panel, Karl Jonsson of Belkin, which makes Wemo devices, indicated that the new Matter devices Wemo was producing would work without an app. In fact, Wemo doesn’t really care about the app experience. It just wants to sell well-designed devices.
While that’s not a common sentiment among many device makers, it’s worth pointing out that in the wake of Matter, we’re going to see a lot of companies build the bare minimum for certain devices. Companies that want to avoid becoming commodity hardware makers are going to have to develop services and software that make downloading their app or buying their more expensive devices worthwhile.
Finally, according to a representative from the CSA, the Matter standard is still on track for a fall release. So get ready for all of this to become real in the coming months. I can’t wait.
Stacey Higginbotham contributed to this article.
The way Matter multi-admin is implement the different controllers are totally isolated from each other. Consider the implications of this — the bindings, scenes, device defaults, etc set up by these controllers are totally isolated from each other.
So if you bind a light switch to a light bulb, that binding is private per controller. If you want that binding to work on Google, Amazon and Home Assistant (ie three controllers) you have to make the binding three times. The controllers can’t even query what the other controllers did. Consider the impact on scenes. They aren’t shared. First off, they don’t even work in Matter. Because of this they have to be build in the controllers. And second, there is no way to share the scenes. In multi-admin everything is completely isolated.
You can’t design the home automation for a house once and share it between the controllers. With multi-admin it is like you have a network for each controller in the house that can’t talk to the other networks.
This design is great for the controller manufacturers — they can completely ignore what anyone else is doing on the network. Not so great for the home owner who is going to have to duplicate their automations on each fabric and then keep them in sync.
We still don’t have any information on Multi-Admin. In theory, Alexa can find out your thread devices on AppleTV and Homekit can operate Zigbee devices on the Echo’s hub. But we don’t know yet how that will really operate. Just like today though, Siri and alexa would be able to control the same devices, but the scenes and routines we create in homekit or Alexa would be separate. Maybe siri could trigger that alexa routine, but it really won’t Matter because if you take a second and buy the right products now we already have all that today.
I am building Matter devices in my company. We have working prototypes.
You can build a working system too if you want, just build some of these examples.
https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip/tree/master/examples
Home Assistant will host a webinar on the 15th on building and setting up matter with HA. They even have plans to let people test and make their first Matter radio. Links to buy the proper boards and will walk people through on youtube.
Nothing on how in-home networks will be managed?
A major issue with consumer IoT is energy, which is where ZigBee, ZWave, and the other 90+ protocols mostly come from. When these low-power networks are dropped into a home, they need separate network segments, or they will crush the performance of gaming and media consumption.
On the controllers, presumably these are IPv6 as one of the big issues with the IPv4 stacks is that it can take up to 30s to set up a connection to a device because of the messiness of getting over NAT.
In terms of zigbee and zwave, “Living room lights On” hardly uses any data, wouldn’t have any effect on your gaming network.
When it comes to launches in 2022, I wonder who will be first, Matter, StarShip, or Artemis? Will any of them even make it? lol
Hi Kevin, with Matter coming in the Fall, is there any reason to wait to buy a Schlage Encode Plus lock? Might Schlage release an updated, Matter-compliant version in 2023? If so, what benefits might it offer (or what limitations might existing owners face post-rollout of Matter)? This is probably the one bit of smart home gear I am interested in.
Matter is built upon Thread, which requires a home network have no IPv6 security enabled; manufactures concern with “authentic devices” is not about their devices being “malware-infested bots”, they are worried about counterfeit devices cutting into their profit margins.
If as you say, your home will still have multiple controllers coming from multiple manufactures which are unlikely to communicate with each other, then how is this any different than what we have today? Having Matter being backed by the Zigbee Alliance doesn’t provide much comfort.
I would not assume that Matter being the next version of Zigbee is much of a boon for developers; the Zigbee Cluster Library is the end result of the alliance’s attempt to fix two decades worth incompatibilities. Take a look for instance at their ZAP tool and its templating language:
https://github.com/project-chip/zap/blob/master/docs/template-tutorial.md
That is a pre-XML, C preprocessor design; a modern approach would have an end result that would be descriptive YAML/JSON.
It should not come as a surprise that Matter won’t be able to cover either Apple or Google’s current device’s capabilities, ZCL is old. If you google for the Zigbee C luster Library Specification you will find a specification that does not cover many modern device’s capabilities.
This is a mixed bag of comments…
Thread is optional in Matter. Matter works just fine on Wifi/Ethernet. There is no REQUIREMENT that you use Thread based devices. So that aspect is a personal choice.
I agree that the decision to design multi-admin to create vendor isolated networks is a poor one. Customers want to design their home automation once, and not have to recreate it over and over on each different controller. I suspect it was decided this way to remove the need for these vendors to work together.
ZCL was not an awful choice. It was a reasonable place to start. Note that Matter only used the top most layer of Zigbee, all of the Zigbee networking design was discarded. It is easy to create new cluster definitions in ZCL. I expect we will see definitions for smart speakers and cameras in the next revision (after the first one ships).
ZAP was a horrible choice. Without needing a huge amount of work ZAP could be replaced with XSLT. XSLT is not the most friendly solution in the world, but given the architecture of CHIP it was an easy switch to make. ZAP is way too big and too slow which is why they check in the generated code to git. What takes ZAP 10 seconds to do XSLT can do in milliseconds. With millisecond generation times, the code could be generated during the build process instead of being checked in. Use of ZAP has cost them thousands of hours of developer time. There are better solutions than XSLT but they require more rework and thinking of the problem in different ways.
I don’t think Device Attestation is about protecting profit margins. Personally I’ve never seen a counterfeit IOT device, they are too much trouble to build. This is more about stopping malicious actors from using OTA to remotely replace the firmware on your devices. If you want to manufacture your own CHIP devices you can get them tested and have your own Device Attestation certificate for about $1,500. That’s less than UL and FCC testing costs.
Hobbyists can make device too without paying, what you can’t do is put those devices into the global Matter network where they would get OTA updates. For that you need to pass certification. You should still be able to post a design and have each person that builds it generate their own local keys. What I don’t know is if controllers from Google/Apple/Amazon will talk to these uncertified devices. Hopefully there were be a UI setting which enables use of those devices.
Very good points.
One small note: counterfeit home automation devices are a huge problem in the Asia region, particularly on Ali Express, where they sometimes have the same physical outer cases as the authentic devices.
Xioami/Aqara have been particularly hard hit, so much so that they will not honour warranties for devices bought outside “official channels.” Aeotec has also been affected to a lesser degree.
https://homekitnews.com/2018/08/01/aqara-clarify-confusion-over-product-compatibility/
So it’s been a real but largely regional issue. My guess is that the emphasis in Matter is to reflect Aqara’s concerns. They were one of the first to announce a Matter-compatible hub back in September 2021 and they are an important member of the coalition.
I don’t know if I would classify that as “counterfeit”. Mijia made products which were initially Aqara compatible, but then Aqara changed their software to cause them not to function. Counterfeit would be if Mijia was putting their stuff into boxes stating Aqara and not making any mention of Mijia. But they don’t appear to have done that. Of course Aqara will call then “counterfeit” but it is more like an unlicensed compatibility problem.
This situation is truly messed up… Mihia and Aqara are both subsidiaries of Xiaomi. So this seems to be a spat between two divisions of the same company.
https://home-automations.net/xiaomi-mijia-vs-aqara-gateway/
I’d categorize this as very poor management on the part of Xiaomi.
There was definitely a lot of confusion between mi home and aqara when aqara was first introduced, although I haven’t heard of an issue with the boxes when coming from the manufacturer themselves. Just people not understanding which devices provided which features with which hubs and the descriptions not being very helpful. That problem has been reduced over time as the two divisions have gotten better about describing their products.
there’s also been a separate major counterfeiting problem by third parties. And third parties definitely did sell mi home devices in aqara boxes, a form of counterfitting.
Aqara’s warranty statement still says:
“ This warranty does not apply to any products purchased from third party sellers on eBay and other online marketplaces. We strongly suggest that you do not buy Aqara products from any unauthorized sellers, as such products may be used, defective, counterfeit or may not be designed for use in your country.”