Time and time again I get to talk about the growing world of smart things, smart homes, and all connected devices that make up the concept of the Internet of Things. The skeptical would consider this idea of having all the devices in your home talk to each other, quite frightening. Actually, I don’t blame the skeptical. Considering how risky it can be to be online, the IoT only exacerbates that idea. Luckily, problem solvers are on the hunt to protect our security. One company, called Dojo Labs, wants to address this problem by scoping out the entirety of the home network with a little device that sits on your router.

After an entire year, the Israeli tech startup from was happy to get Dojo officially launched this week. Now up for pre-order, Dojo isn’t the typical security set-up, consisting of cameras and motion detectors. Instead, it is a tiny device you plug into your router. Because the actual threat to your home involves the devices you put in it and use, Dojo spots and blocks anomalous behavior, “whether that behavior is hackers trying to infiltrate your devices remotely, or your device is trying to send your personal data somewhere they shouldn’t be”. Heck, I don’t have a smart home but I’d gladly use Dojo to protect myself from my own smartphone!

Dojo can warn you the minute you are about to go to a bad website, and it does so by taking note of metadata- a method for monitoring the ways a device’s data moves, while not accessing the actual data itself. Cnet says,

“To understand the importance of metadata, you first have to understand that every device treats data differently, whether it simply stores information (energy monitors), sends it to the cloud (thermostats) or commands other devices (smartphones). By identifying products using categorical buckets, like “thermostats” or “outlets”, Dojo can identify inappropriate activity”.

Nothing has ever made more sense to me. Nothing has ever sounded more sweet. The installation process is apparently as easy as plugging the large pebble-looking Dojo into your router, installing the app, and then watching as it scans your network and displays what it finds (Engadget). Dojo lights up when it is irritated by suspicious activity, yellow to red based on the level. Everything you need to know will show up on your app, giving you the control over your own privacy. For anyone interested, Dojo’s pre-order price of $99 is for a limited time only, and will go up to $199 after the promotion period ends.