Wireless security - How safe is Z-wave?

Abstract

It's becoming a wireless world. But while high data rate wireless standards like Wi-Fi and WiMax have been grabbing the headlines, the market for low data rate wireless could turn out to be even bigger. The US-based standards body IEEE organised a task group to develop a standard for low power, low data rate networks. As a result, the ZigBee Alliance was set up by a number of companies to work together to build on 802.15.4. However, a rival technology to ZigBee, called Z-Wave, has received the support of chip giant Intel, as well as networking heavyweight Cisco. In many ways, Z-Wave and ZigBee are similar. Both are wireless standards. Both use mesh networks. Both are designed for low power. Though ZigBee provides for a higher data rate than Z-Wave, both standards provide for relatively low throughput. But proponents of ZigBee claim that Z-Wave is considerably less robust.