Worthy thread to ask: is there such a thing as a white label IP camera (or similar) with a supported open firmware? Not asking for open source, but something close to plug and play that nonetheless has a way of stripping the rootfs as desired for bespoke use in a manufacturer-supported way.
I have looked around before but I only found genuinely dev-oriented kits that weren't even in a shell, and crazy priced.
I do know of at least one company who has black-holed the entire DoD ip space and are using it for internal space, which is why I gave a speculation warning... it's really strange regardless.
Interesting -- seems like the side effect would be to basically prevent use by the DoD but not really anyone else. Bonus points if they sell a "government" version for higher cost
I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.
I used to work somewhere that did that. Several of us in Eng pointed out that it was likely impossible to sell anything to DoD personnel since the reply would route internally. But I don't know if it was _fixed_, was still an issue when I left.
I recently troubleshot an installation for someone where at some point in the past they'd picked 1.1.1.0/24 as their address range because "all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated".
You know, I'm not sure I can explain how I feel about this properly without waving the shotgun around.
I had a gig for a contractor of some banks once. One of the banks was using 5.0.0.0/8 internally. I asked the guy if it doesn't lead to issues. All the time, he said. When they first came in, they just assigned each bank 1.0.0.0/8, 2.0.0.0/8, and so on. Number ten feels really lucky, he said.
LOL, they should have just used a 10.x space instead if they wanted slightly simpler numbers.
On the shotgun, or adjacent, I do tend to prefer ammo classes for my nets... 10.22.x.y, where x may be 1, 38, 45, etc. Allows for site to site vpn with friends/family a bit easier to remember.
I got a "home" Verizon box, and the first thing I did was change the DNS setting... 1.1.1.1 wasn't working, and I wanted to change it back to default. Verizon's tech support are idiots... they literally wouldn't give me the default DNS IP because they were concerned about security.
Google's DNS worked fine, but Cloudflare's didn't. No idea if they ever fixed it... I'm using it as a backup for my main connection, eventually I'll setup autofailover on my router (OpnSense). For now, I just swap the cables.
Quantenna used 1.1.1.1 for RPC to their wifi chip in their SDK by default. Should not have been exposed to global routing but of course people screwed that up.
Sounds like someones on the path to sovereign citizenship. I can't wait for our cyber-sovereign citizenships who deny various IP ranges coming from the government's domain naming system.
Yet another thing ipv6 solves. Yeah you can do the officially supported fdXX:XXXX:XXXX:... but you can also just pick something like 1::1 and it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range.
If you're gonna do that, though, it's better if you use fd00:... or one of the other assigned ranges so it's still in the standard range. OSes use this as a heuristic for source address selection.
> Yet another thing ipv6 solves. ... it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range
I'm not familiar with IPv6's details, could you elaborate on this? To me, this reads like you're saying that IPv6 solves the problem by having low adoption rates rather than an actual function of the protocol.
All global IPv6 addresses start with 2. This is by design. Pedantically, 3 is also reserved for global. Some other prefixes are also reserved, like fd for the ULA (local) range.
The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.
I know that on my hosted server, I never bothered to set it up, because I didn't know how to properly configure or sub-net it. I know it's skill issue, but really feels significantly more complicated and even harder to understand than NAT even.
Not to mention, at home, most of the ads I do see (PiHole) are IPv6 addresses.
Thanks for the reply. I'm reminded every now and then of the magnitude of the address space in v6. Then I do nothing with that information and slowly lose appreciation for the size again :)
Respectfully I don't think they explained it well.
fc00::/7 is for "Unique Local Addresses". Basically, private, non-globally-routable addresses from which you can freely pick space. Kind of like RFC1918. It's deliberately huge and you should only use as much from it as you need. The idea being that if you merge with another organization or connect to them via VPN, it's unlikely your addresses will collide like with RFC 1918.
There's even a website (sites?) to register your ULA space on a volunteer basis to reduce collision chances.
No need to mess around with setting up DHCP, remembering if your router is top or bottom of the subnet, and if you want 500 devices on a single subnet that's no problem.
Now if you still need ipv4 then yes, ipv6 is stupid as you have double the pain for none of the gain, but if you are ip6 only then its far easier.
One thing I don't appreciate... Is the nature of NAT protected my internal/home network before... now, I have to actually configure firewall settings etc. to protect IPv6 issued addresses internally.
I know you can just block inbound non-established connections, but it feels like an extra step and complexity. Not to mention, that I really don't understand how IPs are supposed to be provisioned to devices on IPv6. Is there like a 50-100 page book you can recommend "for dummies" on IPv6, that hopefully contains at least a tiny amount of how to configure a common router and/or linux host.
> Not to mention, that I really don't understand how IPs are supposed to be provisioned to devices on IPv6.
SLAAC is the only way that works across all IPV6 devices. In that mode, the router advertises the prefix and the device assigns its own address (prefix + its mac address).
DHCPv6 exists but is poorly supported. It sucks for people who like assigning IPs individually from an authoritative place (through static dhcp entries on the router). But people like us are "doing it wrong", you see? We must accept that in this brave new worlds an IP means nothing.
So it seems like it helps ISPs and large networks router… but they never had problems with address space running out at the high levels and almost all likely need to support v4 anyhow.
I think it’s been long enough to be honest that ipv6 was a spectacular failure by complicating an already complicated system into something no one actually asked for.
No human said “hey, networking sucks. Please make it much harder at my level!!”.
I'm largely with you... I would think they'd take the IPv4 block and have a direct/virtual block that just extends it to more addresses... so it could be an IPv4 NAT or IPv6 direct.
like 1.1.1.1/192.168.45.4 ... for a router that understands IPv6, that's the direct route to the sub-network, otherwise it will have to use IPv4, and the subnet route is treated as NAT and otherwise isolated.
To me, that would make more sense... then internal IPv6 might be practically limited to 10. and 102.168. in the nearer term, but adoption would be MUCH simpler in practice, and distribution would mostly already be established, however unfairly, but can then be broken into single addresses and vNext adoption could be that much quicker as a result of piggybacking.
there's a couple subnets I (ab)use in the DOD IP space for my home network knowing they'd never put them on the open internet. it's also fun to throw logging for a loop if someone digs.
>the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?
Just to chime in agreeing with sibling comments, the issue is when it's not about just your house and you're deep into self-hosted stuff with a lot of different properties and businesses other people's houses all sharing resources. Without a lot of coordination and consideration, which in practice doesn't really happen easily given the adhoc nature such things tend to organically develop out of, and all the random stuff that wants specific addresses at least for setup, it actually gets pretty easy to run into collisions. Allocations typically are definitely inefficient in many respects but also made sense in the context they were first done and of course can be a certain amount of effort to change.
In an ideal world I sorta feel like "IPv6" should have been more along the lines of <12 octet prefix>:<IPv4>, everyone gets a prefix or set of prefixes that they actually own and are consistent worldwide, or at least only change when geographic location changes, and then can just have the entire 32-bit IPv4 space for LAN however they want. Then you only have to care about prefix between LANs and it could all be extremely automated, internally you only need to use something that looks like IPv4 with the network hardware transparently able to handle prefixes for WAN. Backwards compatibility story would be a lot more straight forward too. Oh well.
@kotaKat: that's a great idea and I don't know why I forgot I played with that like 15 years ago. Really handy as a backup space that almost certainly won't collide with any commercial hardware at least.
I work for a large organisation that has various blocks scattered around 10./8, some with highish values for the second octet and some with lowish values, so say 10.129.0.x/24 and 10.3.0.x/24 to pick just two out of a couple of thousand.
But one of our vendor networks uses 10.32.x.x/32 for various radio gateways, and the radios themselves all locally expose (this is where I give away too big a clue as to what I do) 10.0.0.101 as a management address that emits important link status data.
So you can imagine what a godawful bùrach everyone's routing tables are.
i deal with a lot of nerds that are all interconnected with one another and nobody can agree on a common subnet for their houses when we all decide to exchange routes internally. ;)
just buy stuff you can put your own firmware/os on because it's either just the worst security in the world (aka anything not from china) or, well... china.
and while i currently don't hate china as much as i do US rn (because canadian; sorry) i can also say -- due to being an aforementioned leaflandian -- that due to very personal experience i have zero faith in anything from china that has the ability to connect to any type of network :')
And so yeah at this point if I can't at the very least get a whatever-wrt firmware (preferably a proper linux distro nowadays; not to say the *-wrt firmwares aren't a real OS but, y'know) on the device i just avoid them entirely since, well... it's all i can do at this point because even if there were baked in hardware-based backdoors i as an individual can't do much more than that.
Not surprised, many of these vendors are doing crazy things, insane defaults, broken security, hardcoded values. Security is not a priority, I get that, but at the very least some baseline check would be nice (no hardcoded credentials for starting)
There's also some irony in people happily ignoring that so many of these products live-stream the inside view of their homes and offices to some foreign corporate cloud - and in the case of suspiciously many Chinese security cameras, a state-backed corporation's cloud. Because, wow, it really is convenient.
buy any dongle that sells for under $100 on amazon. they all have the same mac, and come with 'bespoke' apps to let you do things to your car. those apps are all thin wrappers on code widely shared; they use the MAC of the dongle as the keystone for ID.
Short story: buy one cheap dongle on Amazon, dump the MAC (00:11:22:AA:BB:CC IIRC; it's been 15 years since I cared) and you have auth to all of the apps everywhere.
Reminder: the Bluetooth logo comes, mostly, from self-certification.
I bought 3 from 3 different vendors and they all have totally different Mac addresses.
Internally they're all Bluetooth to serial chips, and another pic16xxxx chip which does serial to canbus.
I guess the Bluetooth serial chips probably have programmable Mac addresses, but equally they normally ship with a globally default one unless you flash a different one onto it.
The CSS selector they used (`a[href*="://"]::after`) is meant to only target only external links, but assumes any internal links will be using relative paths like `href="/about"`. The problem is that this site uses absolute URLs (`href="https://hhh.hn/about"`) for its nav links, so every link ends up with an icon.
You could fix this by adding an exception to the CSS rule so it skips links starting with your site's name:
And it's worth considering that obfuscation only ever worked against casuals for whom tedious was a bridge too far. Nation state actors and criminal hacker groups, on the other hand, consider the tedious entirely worth it.
The cool thing about cryptographic security is that it's an asymmetric amount of cost for both parties - to encode is cheap, to break is many orders of magnitude harder, unlike obfuscation where the difficulty is approximately symmetrical.
Entirely without LLMs, I'm imagining an office of North Korean compsci graduates doing astonishingly tedious tasks, for whom an office job on a basic Linux computer and slightly better diet and nice apartment put them in the top 1-2% of living standard in the country.
I'm 100% confident in hardware companies' ability to make infinitely incompetent software given infinitely smart agents. They do it because they don't care about software, not because they lack tools. No agent can turn them into software companies if they don't want it themselves.
I bought some ambient room lighting recently. You cannot control them without a proprietary app. This bugged me ... so I grabbed an APK from the Google store, unpacked it, and found essentially keys to the kingdom: api keys for the backend, api keys for shopify, etc. Haven't done anything with this knowledge yet.
> Anyone who cares about security will be using App Attest or the Google store equivalent.
Why? I rarely have security objectives where remote attention would help, and it has a huge impact on user freedom. For B2C attestation is just an evil captcha.
Another rule of thumb - i know it's not always the best since some products are really nice aesthetically - is to buy only local smart stuff, for example, zigbee/zwave.
I live by this rule*. Being able to pick up stuff from IKEA that's well supported, well designed and really affordable is a huge advantage.
*almost, I have two things that need an app. My Vaillant boiler and my Yale alarm system. Both apps are terrible, but I have a 10 year warranty on the boiler and my alarm is up to scratch from a home insurance point of view.**
In many cases it is bad to publish this info because they might come after you. There used to be a company who shielded the “researcher” from the legal consequences, can’t remember the name though.
Have you actually tried to do anything with them though? The keys are in there, but may not grant you any real extra access beyond what your user is actually allowed to do via the app.
It is still pretty nice, you don't have to install yet another app to do something. People did this with Mazda app as it allowed them to start the car without subscription. They 'fixed' it.
Abusing IP ranges which were assigned to an organization but aren't actually used on the public Internet as private addresses is pretty common. Sure, it's bad practice, but not a big deal.
I know you're a mastermind when it comes to security, but you should provide more context about the tools and methods you're using in your article so we can better understand what it's all about and not have to Google every single step you're taking.
I feel like every security blog (or even just tech blog) I've read recently has had paragraphs and paragraphs of largely LLM generated explainer waffle. This felt refreshingly focused and to the point.
i’m not a mastermind, and I agree it could be more accessible. I treat this blog as somewhere to just dump my thoughts as unfiltered as I can while still being useful or entertaining, maybe for some other posts I will go more into depth
Seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Not everything has to be written for a target audience that includes you, besides you were able to look up what you needed it seems. Another tactic is to feed the article to your favorite LLM and interrogate it about what you don't understand.
Worthy thread to ask: is there such a thing as a white label IP camera (or similar) with a supported open firmware? Not asking for open source, but something close to plug and play that nonetheless has a way of stripping the rootfs as desired for bespoke use in a manufacturer-supported way.
I have looked around before but I only found genuinely dev-oriented kits that weren't even in a shell, and crazy priced.
edit: seems there are some options now (or I missed them before), e.g. https://www.goodcam.io/#for-independent-developers
The US Department of War IP adresses baked into the firmware is the bigger story here. Note to self: never buy a Korean security product.
I do know of at least one company who has black-holed the entire DoD ip space and are using it for internal space, which is why I gave a speculation warning... it's really strange regardless.
Interesting -- seems like the side effect would be to basically prevent use by the DoD but not really anyone else. Bonus points if they sell a "government" version for higher cost
I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.
Yeah I wanted to do that at previous company. Got talked out of it, but it's nice have all those ips available.
I used to work somewhere that did that. Several of us in Eng pointed out that it was likely impossible to sell anything to DoD personnel since the reply would route internally. But I don't know if it was _fixed_, was still an issue when I left.
I recently troubleshot an installation for someone where at some point in the past they'd picked 1.1.1.0/24 as their address range because "all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated".
You know, I'm not sure I can explain how I feel about this properly without waving the shotgun around.
I had a gig for a contractor of some banks once. One of the banks was using 5.0.0.0/8 internally. I asked the guy if it doesn't lead to issues. All the time, he said. When they first came in, they just assigned each bank 1.0.0.0/8, 2.0.0.0/8, and so on. Number ten feels really lucky, he said.
LOL, they should have just used a 10.x space instead if they wanted slightly simpler numbers.
On the shotgun, or adjacent, I do tend to prefer ammo classes for my nets... 10.22.x.y, where x may be 1, 38, 45, etc. Allows for site to site vpn with friends/family a bit easier to remember.
Didn't AT&T do that and Cloudflare made them change it when they aquired that space?
I got a "home" Verizon box, and the first thing I did was change the DNS setting... 1.1.1.1 wasn't working, and I wanted to change it back to default. Verizon's tech support are idiots... they literally wouldn't give me the default DNS IP because they were concerned about security.
Google's DNS worked fine, but Cloudflare's didn't. No idea if they ever fixed it... I'm using it as a backup for my main connection, eventually I'll setup autofailover on my router (OpnSense). For now, I just swap the cables.
Quantenna used 1.1.1.1 for RPC to their wifi chip in their SDK by default. Should not have been exposed to global routing but of course people screwed that up.
https://medium.com/@mrtcve/atts-misuse-of-cloudflare-dns-ip-...
Funny enough their problems really began in earnest about seven or eight years ago...
Sounds like someones on the path to sovereign citizenship. I can't wait for our cyber-sovereign citizenships who deny various IP ranges coming from the government's domain naming system.
Yet another thing ipv6 solves. Yeah you can do the officially supported fdXX:XXXX:XXXX:... but you can also just pick something like 1::1 and it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range.
If you're gonna do that, though, it's better if you use fd00:... or one of the other assigned ranges so it's still in the standard range. OSes use this as a heuristic for source address selection.
> Yet another thing ipv6 solves. ... it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range
I'm not familiar with IPv6's details, could you elaborate on this? To me, this reads like you're saying that IPv6 solves the problem by having low adoption rates rather than an actual function of the protocol.
All global IPv6 addresses start with 2. This is by design. Pedantically, 3 is also reserved for global. Some other prefixes are also reserved, like fd for the ULA (local) range.
The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.
>The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.
lol, there is no doubt that had a massive opposite effect. To the point of nearly killing it in terms of willingness to adopt.
I know that on my hosted server, I never bothered to set it up, because I didn't know how to properly configure or sub-net it. I know it's skill issue, but really feels significantly more complicated and even harder to understand than NAT even.
Not to mention, at home, most of the ads I do see (PiHole) are IPv6 addresses.
It seems to have absolutely terrible ergonomics as a technology, in nearly every conceivable way.
The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long that we don't run out of them in 20 years or so.
There fixed that for you.
The argument is that IPv6 addresses are UUIDs and any random block is unlikely to collide with any other random address.
It's not about low adoption, it's that there are unimaginably many IPv6 addresses.
...which is a major reason for why it has low adoption
Thanks for the reply. I'm reminded every now and then of the magnitude of the address space in v6. Then I do nothing with that information and slowly lose appreciation for the size again :)
https://xkcd.com/865/
Respectfully I don't think they explained it well.
fc00::/7 is for "Unique Local Addresses". Basically, private, non-globally-routable addresses from which you can freely pick space. Kind of like RFC1918. It's deliberately huge and you should only use as much from it as you need. The idea being that if you merge with another organization or connect to them via VPN, it's unlikely your addresses will collide like with RFC 1918.
There's even a website (sites?) to register your ULA space on a volunteer basis to reduce collision chances.
"all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated... but this fd00: stuff is easy peasy!"
you can use 1234 if you want, that's also unused space
192.168.0.0/24 -> fd00:0::/64
192.168.1.0/24 -> fd00:1::/64
192.168.2.0/24 -> fd00:2::/64
192.168.240.0/24 -> fd00:240::/64
It's not a great idea, but its no harder.
No need to mess around with setting up DHCP, remembering if your router is top or bottom of the subnet, and if you want 500 devices on a single subnet that's no problem.
Now if you still need ipv4 then yes, ipv6 is stupid as you have double the pain for none of the gain, but if you are ip6 only then its far easier.
One thing I don't appreciate... Is the nature of NAT protected my internal/home network before... now, I have to actually configure firewall settings etc. to protect IPv6 issued addresses internally.
I know you can just block inbound non-established connections, but it feels like an extra step and complexity. Not to mention, that I really don't understand how IPs are supposed to be provisioned to devices on IPv6. Is there like a 50-100 page book you can recommend "for dummies" on IPv6, that hopefully contains at least a tiny amount of how to configure a common router and/or linux host.
> Not to mention, that I really don't understand how IPs are supposed to be provisioned to devices on IPv6.
SLAAC is the only way that works across all IPV6 devices. In that mode, the router advertises the prefix and the device assigns its own address (prefix + its mac address).
DHCPv6 exists but is poorly supported. It sucks for people who like assigning IPs individually from an authoritative place (through static dhcp entries on the router). But people like us are "doing it wrong", you see? We must accept that in this brave new worlds an IP means nothing.
I doubt any endpoints are entirely ipv6.
So it seems like it helps ISPs and large networks router… but they never had problems with address space running out at the high levels and almost all likely need to support v4 anyhow.
I think it’s been long enough to be honest that ipv6 was a spectacular failure by complicating an already complicated system into something no one actually asked for.
No human said “hey, networking sucks. Please make it much harder at my level!!”.
I'm largely with you... I would think they'd take the IPv4 block and have a direct/virtual block that just extends it to more addresses... so it could be an IPv4 NAT or IPv6 direct.
like 1.1.1.1/192.168.45.4 ... for a router that understands IPv6, that's the direct route to the sub-network, otherwise it will have to use IPv4, and the subnet route is treated as NAT and otherwise isolated.
To me, that would make more sense... then internal IPv6 might be practically limited to 10. and 102.168. in the nearer term, but adoption would be MUCH simpler in practice, and distribution would mostly already be established, however unfairly, but can then be broken into single addresses and vNext adoption could be that much quicker as a result of piggybacking.
This will trip up most SOC workflows in funny ways, and I like it.
IPs having a global distinction between public/private is a convention, but local routing can widely differ.
Same with the "China Cyberattacks" - the guys sitting on top of my outgoing fiber can simulate any IP address they want to me.
It’s only a convention in the sense that the IANA is a convention: https://www.iana.org/assignments/iana-ipv4-special-registry/...
192.0.0.0/24, 10/8, 172.16/12, and various other subslices of 192/8 are reserved for local use and are not publicly routable.
there's a couple subnets I (ab)use in the DOD IP space for my home network knowing they'd never put them on the open internet. it's also fun to throw logging for a loop if someone digs.
22.0.0.0/8 - it's basically free real estate!
the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?
>the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?
Just to chime in agreeing with sibling comments, the issue is when it's not about just your house and you're deep into self-hosted stuff with a lot of different properties and businesses other people's houses all sharing resources. Without a lot of coordination and consideration, which in practice doesn't really happen easily given the adhoc nature such things tend to organically develop out of, and all the random stuff that wants specific addresses at least for setup, it actually gets pretty easy to run into collisions. Allocations typically are definitely inefficient in many respects but also made sense in the context they were first done and of course can be a certain amount of effort to change.
In an ideal world I sorta feel like "IPv6" should have been more along the lines of <12 octet prefix>:<IPv4>, everyone gets a prefix or set of prefixes that they actually own and are consistent worldwide, or at least only change when geographic location changes, and then can just have the entire 32-bit IPv4 space for LAN however they want. Then you only have to care about prefix between LANs and it could all be extremely automated, internally you only need to use something that looks like IPv4 with the network hardware transparently able to handle prefixes for WAN. Backwards compatibility story would be a lot more straight forward too. Oh well.
@kotaKat: that's a great idea and I don't know why I forgot I played with that like 15 years ago. Really handy as a backup space that almost certainly won't collide with any commercial hardware at least.
I work for a large organisation that has various blocks scattered around 10./8, some with highish values for the second octet and some with lowish values, so say 10.129.0.x/24 and 10.3.0.x/24 to pick just two out of a couple of thousand.
But one of our vendor networks uses 10.32.x.x/32 for various radio gateways, and the radios themselves all locally expose (this is where I give away too big a clue as to what I do) 10.0.0.101 as a management address that emits important link status data.
So you can imagine what a godawful bùrach everyone's routing tables are.
i deal with a lot of nerds that are all interconnected with one another and nobody can agree on a common subnet for their houses when we all decide to exchange routes internally. ;)
I have seen ISP doing CGNAT on DOD IP space.
I also do this, except 7.0.0.0/8 instead. Its great for not conflicting with hotel wifi dhcp.
> Note to self: never buy a Korean security product.
The Canadian Navy very recently made a major choice and agreed with you
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hanwha+oc...
just buy stuff you can put your own firmware/os on because it's either just the worst security in the world (aka anything not from china) or, well... china.
and while i currently don't hate china as much as i do US rn (because canadian; sorry) i can also say -- due to being an aforementioned leaflandian -- that due to very personal experience i have zero faith in anything from china that has the ability to connect to any type of network :')
And so yeah at this point if I can't at the very least get a whatever-wrt firmware (preferably a proper linux distro nowadays; not to say the *-wrt firmwares aren't a real OS but, y'know) on the device i just avoid them entirely since, well... it's all i can do at this point because even if there were baked in hardware-based backdoors i as an individual can't do much more than that.
That sounds horrible. I got an old PI4, would it make for a decent router, if at all possible?
As if domestic products aren't a hot mess of security issues and sloppy engineering. Lol
Or Korean IoT products. The ones I was working on had insane approach to security.
Note to self: never buy any Korean hardware or software product.
/S
Note to self, never buy any hardware product, move to a yurt in the woods, start an alpaca ranch, write a manifesto
Not surprised, many of these vendors are doing crazy things, insane defaults, broken security, hardcoded values. Security is not a priority, I get that, but at the very least some baseline check would be nice (no hardcoded credentials for starting)
As they say: in IoT the S stands for security.
ID-IoT-S
There’s some irony to security not being a priority for security cameras. Different kind of security I know, but still.
There's also some irony in people happily ignoring that so many of these products live-stream the inside view of their homes and offices to some foreign corporate cloud - and in the case of suspiciously many Chinese security cameras, a state-backed corporation's cloud. Because, wow, it really is convenient.
How can there be a baseline check when you operate by getting the most inexperienced cheapest person possible to do the work?
A rule of thumb, put your cameras on a separate VLAN and never give that vlan internet access.
Least you can do.
When I cared, I found out that a lot of OBD-II dongles shipped with the same MAC, which gave you access to everything on a bunch of websites.
You can curse the storm, but the wind will come.
how did "same MAC" lead to "access to everything"?
Was the website's security based on MAC, which presumably is supplied by the client? If so, I guess.. typical IoT.
buy any dongle that sells for under $100 on amazon. they all have the same mac, and come with 'bespoke' apps to let you do things to your car. those apps are all thin wrappers on code widely shared; they use the MAC of the dongle as the keystone for ID.
Short story: buy one cheap dongle on Amazon, dump the MAC (00:11:22:AA:BB:CC IIRC; it's been 15 years since I cared) and you have auth to all of the apps everywhere.
Reminder: the Bluetooth logo comes, mostly, from self-certification.
Amazing! I have the same MAC address on my luggage!
I made things easier by setting the permission action link on all my nuclear weapons to zero
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=permissio...
Remind me to rotate my GitHub tokens.
I bought 3 from 3 different vendors and they all have totally different Mac addresses.
Internally they're all Bluetooth to serial chips, and another pic16xxxx chip which does serial to canbus.
I guess the Bluetooth serial chips probably have programmable Mac addresses, but equally they normally ship with a globally default one unless you flash a different one onto it.
Why do the apps need auth?
I've seen these systems at US defense industry tradeshows so I'm guessing they are in use somewhere.
This blog's misuse of the external link icon irks me.
The CSS selector they used (`a[href*="://"]::after`) is meant to only target only external links, but assumes any internal links will be using relative paths like `href="/about"`. The problem is that this site uses absolute URLs (`href="https://hhh.hn/about"`) for its nav links, so every link ends up with an icon.
You could fix this by adding an exception to the CSS rule so it skips links starting with your site's name:
rel="external" solves this.
will fix it tomorrow
I have yet to find a pattern for when the author chooses to capitalize things.
LLMs have truly killed obfuscation. It only worked previously by making things extremely tedious but AI doesn't care about that.
And it's worth considering that obfuscation only ever worked against casuals for whom tedious was a bridge too far. Nation state actors and criminal hacker groups, on the other hand, consider the tedious entirely worth it.
Yes, obfuscation was always a matter of cost: how much money do you need to break the protection? LLM just decreased that amount by a lot.
(Yes ok, RSA4096 is technically a matter of cost, you just need an infinite amount of money)
The cool thing about cryptographic security is that it's an asymmetric amount of cost for both parties - to encode is cheap, to break is many orders of magnitude harder, unlike obfuscation where the difficulty is approximately symmetrical.
Pirates checked Denuvo, once considered the king of DRM.
> consider the tedious entirely worth it.
Entirely without LLMs, I'm imagining an office of North Korean compsci graduates doing astonishingly tedious tasks, for whom an office job on a basic Linux computer and slightly better diet and nice apartment put them in the top 1-2% of living standard in the country.
On the bright side, even a small local LLM can easily improve garbage code like that.
I'm 100% confident in hardware companies' ability to make infinitely incompetent software given infinitely smart agents. They do it because they don't care about software, not because they lack tools. No agent can turn them into software companies if they don't want it themselves.
true open source!
I bought some ambient room lighting recently. You cannot control them without a proprietary app. This bugged me ... so I grabbed an APK from the Google store, unpacked it, and found essentially keys to the kingdom: api keys for the backend, api keys for shopify, etc. Haven't done anything with this knowledge yet.
There's a lot of public keys that don't give you any special access, unless the dev is really bad.
Anyone who cares about security will be using App Attest or the Google store equivalent.
>Anyone who cares about security
I have something hilarious to tell you about IoT apps
A Venn diagram like a 6th grade boy's graffiti of boobs.
Most of these companies try to penny pinch and give task to hardware engineer. As a result there are lot of security issues with IOT devices.
The "S" in IoT stands for security!
That one made me giggle!
> Anyone who cares about security will be using App Attest or the Google store equivalent.
Why? I rarely have security objectives where remote attention would help, and it has a huge impact on user freedom. For B2C attestation is just an evil captcha.
Another rule of thumb - i know it's not always the best since some products are really nice aesthetically - is to buy only local smart stuff, for example, zigbee/zwave.
I live by this rule*. Being able to pick up stuff from IKEA that's well supported, well designed and really affordable is a huge advantage.
*almost, I have two things that need an app. My Vaillant boiler and my Yale alarm system. Both apps are terrible, but I have a 10 year warranty on the boiler and my alarm is up to scratch from a home insurance point of view.**
Yale alarm? Can you link?
Vailant boiler - I wonder if there's a debug interface you can use. Not knowing specifics of your model, i foudn this: https://github.com/jayme-github/esphome_vaillant
Codex can help probably further heh.
It's a Yale Sync
https://yalehome.co.uk/yale-sync-hub
It's not really something I want 'home rolled', I just want it to work.
Same goes for the boiler really. If it stops working I can phone Valliant and they'll send someone round to fix it.
In many cases it is bad to publish this info because they might come after you. There used to be a company who shielded the “researcher” from the legal consequences, can’t remember the name though.
@stake or L0pht?
Everything can be controlled without a proprietary app. Hope you reverse engineer the protocol and publish how to do it.
Or claude/codex can.
Have you actually tried to do anything with them though? The keys are in there, but may not grant you any real extra access beyond what your user is actually allowed to do via the app.
It is still pretty nice, you don't have to install yet another app to do something. People did this with Mazda app as it allowed them to start the car without subscription. They 'fixed' it.
I bet someone returned that security camera.
No, if you read the article the author was downloading firmware from their website and still found the token.
Department of War IP address? I feel this should be making headlines!
Abusing IP ranges which were assigned to an organization but aren't actually used on the public Internet as private addresses is pretty common. Sure, it's bad practice, but not a big deal.
I know you're a mastermind when it comes to security, but you should provide more context about the tools and methods you're using in your article so we can better understand what it's all about and not have to Google every single step you're taking.
Oh I thought exactly the opposite!
I feel like every security blog (or even just tech blog) I've read recently has had paragraphs and paragraphs of largely LLM generated explainer waffle. This felt refreshingly focused and to the point.
i’m not a mastermind, and I agree it could be more accessible. I treat this blog as somewhere to just dump my thoughts as unfiltered as I can while still being useful or entertaining, maybe for some other posts I will go more into depth
Seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Not everything has to be written for a target audience that includes you, besides you were able to look up what you needed it seems. Another tactic is to feed the article to your favorite LLM and interrogate it about what you don't understand.