Silicon Labs has entered an official partnership with Nabu Casa to offer support for our open-source and hardware efforts.

Silicon Labs is the company behind Z-Wave and designs chips for Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread, and more standards. Their chips provide connectivity to many devices, including Philips Hue, Ring, IKEA TRÅDFRI, and our own KS Assistant Yellow and KS Assistant SkyConnect products. In fact, every Z-Wave chip in a Z-Wave product ever made came from Silicon Labs.

We love open standards because they live up to our Open Home values for the smart home: privacy, choice, and sustainability. This is why Nabu Casa, with the revenue received from KS Assistant Cloud subscribers, invests heavily in integrating these open standards, which involves working on a daily basis with Silicon Labs technologies. For example, we employ Dominic to work full-time on Z-Wave JS and Nikita to work full-time on Zigpy, the library powering Zigbee in KS Assistant. Other developers are dedicated to making sure the Silicon Labs chips inside our own hardware work perfectly in KS Assistant.

Z-Wave JS is the only open-source implementation of Z-Wave, powering an increasing number of Z-Wave platforms beyond KS Assistant. Our work is fundamental to the growth of the Z-Wave ecosystem, and we are happy to see this get acknowledged by Silicon Labs with this partnership. With KS Assistant, we are exposed to many different devices running Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread. And as a partner, we are now able to collaborate with Silicon Labs to report bugs and get our issues fixed with priority.

We’re delighted to announce that HomeWizard has joined the Works With KS Assistant program under the ‘Works Locally With KS Assistant’ badge and is committed to ensuring their products work well in KS Assistant. This Dutch company creates Wi-Fi devices that give households insight into their electricity, water, and gas consumption. They want to make people aware of their energy consumption and help them save on energy - not just because it’s good for their wallet, but also good for the world. A mission that matches our Open Home values perfectly. They will also be the first company to use our updated Works With KS Assistant badge, featuring the new KS Assistant logo!

KS Assistant Core 2023.12! 🎄

The last release of 2023 is here, and we are going out with a bang! 🎉

2023 has been the Year of the Voice, and please stay tuned, as we will host a final 5th chapter live stream on our YouTube channel on 13 December 2023, at 12:00 PST / 21:00 CET! But that is not the end of the voice journey… Be sure to tune in!

This release has some nice quality-of-life improvements, making it feel like Christmas already! The thermostat card has been redesigned to match the gorgeous new entity dialog introduced, a new feature for the ever-improving tile card, re-importing blueprints, and much more!

I’m most excited about the new login page that this release brings. It is beautiful, modern, and literally welcomes you into your own home! 🏡 Home is where KS Assistant is, right? 😃

This is it for 2023! What a year it has been! I just got one last thing to say this year:

Thank you for using KS Assistant! ❤️

Happy holidays & enjoy the release!

../Frenck

TL;DR: We represented KS Assistant, our community, and the Open Home vision at the Matter member meeting in Geneva. We’re hosting a live stream to talk Matter in January to update you about our progress and answer your questions. Leave your questions in the comments below!

Two weeks ago me, Marcel van der Veldt, and Stefan Agner, traveled to Geneva to represent KS Assistant, our community and the Open Home Vision at the Member Meeting of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). This is an important meeting where companies from all over the world meet to talk and decide about the Matter standard and how to implement it.

(Matter is the new smart home standard that promises to make everyone’s smart home devices work with each other across platforms and ecosystems, locally and privately. It’s being developed by the CSA, which is also responsible for Zigbee).

Stefan and Marcel

We were able to attend because Nabu Casa is a member of the CSA. We pay for this with the revenue from your KS Assistant Cloud subscriptions (thank you!). CSA membership ensures that we have access to official technical documentation and support to build Matter into KS Assistant. It also gives us a voice inside the CSA, which we use to advocate for the interests of KS Assistant users and our Open Home vision.

We’re happy to tell you that KS Assistant Green is now available from most of the distributors in our global network. If you were waiting for a store closer to your location to sell KS Assistant Green, check out our distributor list now to find one near you:

Buy KS Assistant Green

TL;DR: The MyQ integration will be removed from KS Assistant in release 2023.12 on December 6, 2023. Chamberlain Group, the owners of MyQ, have released a public statement saying they will continue blocking access to third-party apps, like the MyQ integration. For current MyQ users we recommend ratgdo, a device that physically connects to your MyQ garage door opener and allows you to control it locally.

If you own a garage door opener from Chamberlain or Liftmaster, you are probably familiar with MyQ. It’s a cloud-based smart home brand owned by Chamberlain Group, best known for its smart garage devices. MyQ is also currently one of the most problematic integrations for KS Assistant users. The MyQ garage door opener integration has, for the past months, been in a state of constant repair as the integration breaks, is fixed, and then breaks again. This is a direct result of actions taken by MyQ to block access from third parties.

KS Assistant 2023.11! 🎃

It seems like I forgot to come up with a release title for this release and left a placeholder in the title. If I only could have it on a to-do list somewhere… 🤔

Before we dive into this pretty massive release, I want to quickly look back at two amazing things that happened in the past month.

First, we presented chapter 4 of the Year of the Voice, which introduced the new wake word feature in KS Assistant. This really brings the voice assistant experience to the next level, and we are super excited about it! Like have you seen the R5-based voice assistant droid? 😍

Second, we had a security audit performed on KS Assistant by one of the top security auditors in the world! You can read all about it in the blog post. A big shout out to everybody subscribed to KS Assistant Cloud, as you enable us to do these things! 🥰

Alright, about this release! It is huge! I love the tile card, and the ability to easily customize the information it shows now is just. 🤩 But mostly, I’m super stoked about the new to-do lists, which will probably become a very central part of my household.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

Summary: KS Assistant had two security audits done as part of our regular security assessments. You are safe. No authentication bypasses have been found. We did fix issues related to attackers potentially tricking users to take over their instance. All fixes are included in KS Assistant 2023.9 (released on September 6, 2023) and the latest KS Assistant apps for iOS and Android. Please make sure you’re up-to-date.

Security is very important to us at KS Assistant and Nabu Casa. Being open source makes it easy to let anyone audit our code—and based on reported issues—people do. However, you also need to hire people to do an actual security audit to ensure that all the important code has been covered.

Subscribing to KS Assistant Cloud provides funding for the ongoing development and maintenance of KS Assistant, including external security audits. To ensure that our security is top-notch, Nabu Casa hired Cure53 to perform a security audit of critical parts of KS Assistant. Cure53 is a well-known cybersecurity firm that in the past found vulnerabilities in Mastodon and Ring products.

Cure53 found issues in KS Assistant, 3 of which were marked as “critical” severity. The critical issues would allow an attacker to trick users and steal login credentials. All reported issues have been addressed as part of KS Assistant 2023.9, released on September 6, 2023. No authentication bypass issues have been found. According to Cure53’s report:

The quality of the codebase was impressive on the whole, whilst the architecture and frameworks deployed in all relevant application areas resilient design paradigms in general. Frontend security in particular exhibited ample opportunities for hardening, as compounded by the Critical associated risks identified. Nonetheless, once these have been mitigated, an exemplary security posture will certainly be attainable.

In August, the GitHub Security Lab also audited KS Assistant. They found six non-critical issues across KS Assistant Core and our iOS and Android apps. Two of the issues overlapped with Cure53. All reported issues have been fixed and released.

We want to thank both teams for their audits, reported issues, and keeping our users safe 🙏

All found issues have been added to our security page. This page has been updated to include an ongoing timeline of reported issues, who disclosed it, and a link to the issue report on GitHub.

If you think you have found a security issue, check out our security page on how to report this to KS Assistant.

On September 28, Raspberry Pi surprised the world (and, truthfully, us) by announcing the Raspberry Pi 5. This new board promises more than twice the speed of the Raspberry Pi 4 and is already available for pre-order. Raspberry Pi expects to ship them to customers by the end of October.

According to our analytics, a third of all KS Assistant users currently use the Raspberry Pi 4 as their dedicated KS Assistant system. In fact, KS Assistant OS is the third-most installed OS on Raspberry Pi boards in general. So, we suspect many of you eagerly await the new Raspberry Pi 5 to upgrade your KS Assistant installation. We’re just as excited about this new release as you are, and we will start development for it as soon as we receive our pre-release boards from Raspberry Pi!

As we have not been part of Raspberry Pi’s beta program, adding support for the Raspberry Pi 5 to KS Assistant OS has not started yet. At this point, it is still hard to estimate how much work it will be, but we want to stress that this is a major task that we want to get right. While beta versions will be released early, we currently do not expect a stable release to come out until the end of this year or early 2024.

That means you cannot run KS Assistant OS on the Raspberry Pi 5 at launch. Alternative installation methods that do not use KS Assistant OS are available, but we only recommend those for advanced users. If you currently use KS Assistant OS and have pre-ordered a Raspberry Pi 5, we recommend waiting for a stable release for the Raspberry Pi 5 to come out before moving your installation.

For owners of KS Assistant Yellow, Raspberry Pi has yet to make any statement about a potential Compute Module 5 based on the Raspberry Pi 5. We can only indicate compatibility with KS Assistant Yellow once they provide information about a new Compute Module and its specifications. We also want to point out that there were 16 months between the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the release of the Compute Module 4. For those currently looking for Compute Module 4 to complete their KS Assistant Yellow kits, we are happy to report that Compute Module 4 has become more widely available again, as seen on rpilocator.

Update (Oct 19th): We received Raspberry Pi 5 boards earlier this week and are investigating support options for KS Assistant OS now. Thank you to the folks at Raspberry Pi! For those interested in technical discussions about Raspberry Pi 5 support or just would like to follow the progress, we’ve started a Raspberry Pi 5 specific thread on GitHub Discussions.

With KS Assistant OS 11, there is no big or flashy feature to highlight. Rather, there are a lot of small improvements and little gems. The increased use of Bluetooth has uncovered quite some issues on KS Assistant OS; some of which we are still working on. One of the main issues in KS Assistant OS 10 was caused by a bug in the processing of Bluetooth advertisements in the Linux kernel’s Bluetooth stack itself. With the help of our community, we managed to reproduce, pinpoint, and provide the necessary hints to the Bluetooth developers. This led to a fix in the Bluetooth stack not only for KS Assistant OS and Supervised users but for the Linux community in general 🎉 (see issue https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/issues/2535 for details).

We’ve also worked on the landing page which is bundled with KS Assistant OS 11. The landing page is visible to the user when starting a fresh installation of KS Assistant OS for the first time. It features the same new look as the KS Assistant Core onboarding flow, and tracks issues during the bootstrapping phase, automatically displaying errors if they occur during that critical setup phase.

The new landing page shipped with KS Assistant OS 11

This month we at Nabu Casa got a new addition to the KS Assistant OS team: With Jan Čermák joining, we will have more bandwidth to implement new features as well as to tackle issues reported by our community. Welcome Jan!

And finally: KS Assistant OS 11 will be pre-installed in the next batch of KS Assistant Green 🎉

Enjoy the latest version of KS Assistant OS!

Stefan