For Zigbee 3.0 and Z-Wave S2, I believe both the V2 and V3 support the required hardware to support the required upgrades. Although these updates may not launch for all hub targets at the same time, it is certainly our desire to support new version of these core protocols on all platforms that Work as a SmartThings Hub. To the extent that the V2/V3 are both platforms fully managed by the core SmartThings team I would expect to eventually see these platforms come close to converging on the software they run over time.
With that being said, with the chance to manufacture a new version of the hub we had the chance to improve security of the core software platform in several ways that would be impossible (or inadvisable) to do for units in field. Most of these are not noticeable to a user but the high-level bullet points are:
- Traffic between host process and Zigbee chip are now encrypted using a key that is unique per device.
- ARM TrustZone features (via OPTEE) are utilized to provide a strong, isolated environment for storing/accessing auth keys and other sensitive data. This gets technical quick, but basically this means that even a root compromise of the main OS (Linux) would not compromise items owned by the “Secure operating sytem.” This is another security layer we are using (and can expand) to protect users from attacks (or limit the damage caused by a successful attack).
The lack of these features on other platforms do not make them “insecure” but we certainly took the opportunity to make core improvements to add additional layers of security.