Hacking Your Lights

Hacking Your Lights

Increasing we use RESTful Web services to interface to devices. With this you IoT device runs a Web service, and then we call it with a POST HTTPs request (from url) and with various headers set (contained within headers):

r= requests.post(url,json.dumps(data),headers=headers)

Philips Hue lights use a bridge to configure the lights, via a wireless connection. The bridge itself connects to an Ethernet connection on the wireless router. A user is added to /api/username, where username is the name of the user. If we try an invalid name:

import json
import requests
import time

ip="http://192.168.0.11"
headers ={'Content-type':'application/json','Accept':'text/plain'}

url = ip+'/api/fred'

data ={'devicetype':'test user','username':'newdeveloper'}

This will return:

[{"error":{"type":1,"address":"/","description":"unauthorized user"}}]

Now we can register the user with:

import json
import requests
import time

ip="http://192.168.0.11"
headers ={'Content-type':'application/json','Accept':'text/plain'}

# Setup new user
r = requests.get(url)
print r.text

url = ip+"/api"

r= requests.post(url,json.dumps(data),headers=headers)
print r.text

# Get information on lights
url = ip+'/api/newdeveloper/lights'

r=requests.get(url)

print r.text

As you will see, we need to press the button on the bridge to register the new user. Before we press the button we get:

[{"error":{"type":101,"address":"","description":"link button not pressed"}}]
{"1":{"state": {"on":false,"bri":254,"hue":0,"sat":0,"effect":"none","xy":[0.4350,0.4050],"alert":"none","colormode":"hs","reachable":true}, "type": "Color light", "name": "LivingColors 1", "modelid": "LLC010", "manufacturername": "Philips","uniqueid":"00:17:88:01:00:c2:2c:b6-0b", "swversion": "66009461", "pointsymbol": { "1":"none", "2":"none", "3":"none", "4":"none", "5":"none", "6":"none", "7":"none", "8":"none" }},
 "2":{"state": {"on":true,"bri":254,"hue":1000,"sat":254,"effect":"none","xy":[0.6711,0.3236],"ct":153,"alert":"none","colormode":"hs","reachable":true}, "type": "Extended color light", "name": "Hue Go 1", "modelid": "LLC020", "manufacturername": "Philips","uniqueid":"00:17:88:01:01:13:46:17-0b", "swversion": "66014378", "pointsymbol": { "1":"none", "2":"none", "3":"none", "4":"none", "5":"none", "6":"none", "7":"none", "8":"none" }}}

And then after it. The bridge returns:

[{"success":{"username":"newdeveloper"}}]
{"1":{"state": {"on":false,"bri":254,"hue":0,"sat":0,"effect":"none","xy":[0.4350,0.4050],"alert":"none","colormode":"hs","reachable":true}, "type": "Color light", "name": "LivingColors 1", "modelid": "LLC010", "manufacturername": "Philips","uniqueid":"00:17:88:01:00:c2:2c:b6-0b", "swversion": "66009461", "pointsymbol": { "1":"none", "2":"none", "3":"none", "4":"none", "5":"none", "6":"none", "7":"none", "8":"none" }},
 "2":{"state": {"on":true,"bri":254,"hue":1000,"sat":254,"effect":"none","xy":[0.6711,0.3236],"ct":153,"alert":"none","colormode":"hs","reachable":true}, "type": "Extended color light", "name": "Hue Go 1", "modelid": "LLC020", "manufacturername": "Philips","uniqueid":"00:17:88:01:01:13:46:17-0b", "swversion": "66014378", "pointsymbol": { "1":"none", "2":"none", "3":"none", "4":"none", "5":"none", "6":"none", "7":"none", "8":"none" }}}

Next we can configure the lights:

mport json
import requests
import time

ip="http://192.168.0.11"
headers ={'Content-type':'application/json','Accept':'text/plain'}

url = ip+'/api/newdeveloper/lights/2/state'
try:
        while True:
                pdata = {"on":False, "sat":255, "bri":255,"hue":1000}

                r = requests.put(url,data=json.dumps(pdata),headers=headers)

                print r.text

                time.sleep(2)

                pdata = {"on":True, "sat":255, "bri":255,"hue":1000}

                r = requests.put(url,data=json.dumps(pdata),headers=headers)

                time.sleep(2)
                print r.text

except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "End"

The following is a demo: