Seems like 95% of devices could be managed with a hardware filter that only allows through a handful of very rudimentary signals (more like Morse code than a full digital transmission), and then of course a properly designed on-device API that defines those signals and doesn't allow you to trigger a defrost remotely, when that should only ever be done with somebody physically present for example.
Morse code is a fully digital transmission.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.