Restoring a backup to a new hub

I beliv4e some Zooz 500 series switches and dimmer had S2 but most manufacturers wait until the 700 series. I think some of my S2 sensors might have been 500 series but I did not get many. I just added some 700 series sensors with S2. S2 was actually long overdue. I think Zigbee3 already security but I am not sure. I do not know as much about it and have very few zigbee items.

Zigbee has always had 128 bit AES encryption. I believe it was designed into the protocol from the get go and just works, which is why no one ever discusses it.

1 Like

That is what I thought, I guess that was one advantage it had over Z-Wave. I do not think it could automatically reconfigure the mesh like Z-Wave Plus can. Maybe Zigbee3 added that too.

Some manufacturers may have done it of their own volition before this (though not for that long--it is new enough), but S2 became required for certification a few years ago when 500-series was the latest chip. So, you will indeed find many 500-series devices with S2, including the Zooz switches/dimmers. You also won't find any 700-series devices without it; that's because it's been required for certification since before the 700-series existed. In any case, these are mostly unrelated: Hubitat could have made a 500-series hub that supported S2 (as could anyone--I think ST does nowadays? ZWaveJS with a 500-series stick does, too), but their efforts happened to coincide with the release of their 700-series hub and its new Z-Wave implementation.

My understanding is that ZHA 1.2 (and probably ZLL) uses security roughly equivalent to Z-Wave S0 by default; I don't know how "pure" Zigbee 3.0 is supposed to work other than that there is a QR code involved and perhaps that bumps the encryption up to something more like S2. :smiley: (I have yet to use a hub that required this, even when the devices and hub are all 3.0-capable...)

Zigbee has always, in my 7+ years of experience, had a self-healing mesh, and self optimizing routing.

2 Likes

nice, good to know. Looks like Z-Wave is the lagging tech.

IIRC, Zigbee’s bandwidth is 250Kbps versus Z-wave Plus’ max of 100Kbps. Zigbee can theoretically support something like 65,000 devices on a single mesh, to Z-wave’s 232. Z-wave is limited to 4 hops, whereas Zigbee is not.

2 Likes