We now live in an age where someone can back door your back door.

Analysts believe there are currently on the order of 10 billions Internet of Things (IoT) devices out in the wild. Sometimes, these devices find their way up people’s butts: as it turns out, cheap and low-power radio-connected chips aren’t just great for home automation – they’re also changing the way we interact with sex toys. In this talk, we’ll dive into the world of teledildonics and see how connected buttplugs’ security holds up against a vaguely motivated attacker, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at every level of the stack, ultimately allowing us to compromise these toys and the devices they connect to.

Writing about this topic is hard, and not just because penises may be involved. IoT devices pose a grave security risk for all of us, but probably not for you personally. For instance, security cameras have been used to launch attacks on websites. When was the last time you updated the firmware on your security camera, or ran a security scan of it? Probably never. Has your security camera been taken over? Maybe, as of 2017 roughly half the internet-connected cameras in the USA were part of a botnet. Has it been hacked and commanded to send your data to a third party? Almost certainly not, these security cam hacks almost all target something else. Human beings are terrible at assessing risk in general, and the combination of catastrophic consequences to some people but minimal consequences to you only amplifies our weaknesses.

There’s a very fine line between “your car can be hacked to cause a crash!” and “some cars can be hacked to cause a crash,” between “your TV is tracking your viewing habits” and “your viewing habits are available to anyone who knows where to look!” Finding the right balance between complacency and alarmism is impossible given how much we don’t know. And as computers become more intertwined with our intimate lives, whole new incentives come into play. Proportionately, more people would be willing to file a police report about someone hacking their toaster than about someone hacking their butt plug. Not many people own a smart sex toy, but those that do form a very attractive hacking target.

There’s not much we can do about this individually. Forcing people to take an extensive course in internet security just to purchase a butt plug is blaming the victim, and asking the market to solve the problem doesn’t work when market incentives caused the problem in the first place. A proper solution requires collective action as a society, via laws and incentives that help protect our privacy.

Then, and only then, can you purchase your sex toys in peace.