What is worse, your data being sent to people you know or to people you don't know?
Why? Because I know Google has systems in place to detect sysadmins browsing in data unrelated to their job and I know they have fired people over it even if was tought to have been done with good intentions.
Edit: as for tracking I wish they would up their game and stop providing ads for <insert eastern country here>-dating.<tld-of-the-day>
I wish they would take into consideration that I am happily married with more than 3kids, belongs to a subset of the population that has way less than 10% divorce rate and I might even be in the market for a new car at some point.
In fact I would even tell them if they asked.
Smart, connected things? Yes, maybe.
Smart things connecting over the Internet to a corporate cloud? Hell no.
At the interview for my current job I was asked how I'd secure a remote service. My first response was along the lines of "Ask someone who actually knows about security, because I know just enough that I'd probably mess it up".
It is either possible to do something securely and won't really take significantly more time, or it's not possible to do it securely at all, and no future update is going to fix it.
In regards to IoT devices, as the article is lamenting, many are designed with no security in mind and instead seem to be thrown together as quick as possible to achieve a function, without considering the implications that a security breach may have with said device. (e.g., IoT baby monitors, thermostats, home locking systems)
If an application was created without security in mind in worst case it might require complete rewrite. In other cases it might be a whack-a-mole game.
For example compare ssh vs application that simply opens port and starts bash as root. You can use both to control your server, but if you want to add security it would be a lot of work (you could incrementally add authentication, encryption, maybe restrict user what s/he can do but there will be million and one ways to escape).
After fixing one issue after another without seeing the end you'll realize it would be less work to just rewrite it from scratch with security in mind.
Security is not a feature, it is a process.
Edit: Shoutout to Internet of Shit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
How does Tesla implement updates?
An opt-in switch is merely convenience for the incredibly thin % that bothers with this kind of thing. And that % will actually be informed enough to not opt in.
Come to think of it, that % will likely be informed enough not to buy this kind of device in the first place.
Tesla has a pretty vested interest in shit keeping working considering it's a pretty luxurious and high-profile product. The cut-price manufacturer of your $20 lightbulb or $300 fridge? Not so much.
It's not a matter of luxury, it's a matter of having people work on it who care.
Disclosure: I work with them. Much <3 :)
Source: Chromebooks are awesome, and even with excesses like this, they're still the cheapest to operate by far.
A comment in https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=323010 claims that the BSSID is used for a "suspected" state, but that may not be enough to actually stop it from downloading updates, but I'm far from an expert in that domain.
In short, identifying tethering states with iOS seems to be hard.
Hence my shoutout to IoS! :)
Which might be quite a challenge with some devices when your neighbors drown you in free WiFi.
It's easy to build it in a way so that the worst that the software can do is cause it to turn into a "dumb" fridge.
My problem with this whole hatred of iot is that it's not productive.
it's a bunch of people commenting how the trend is dumb and how everything was so much better in the past. Nobody ever gives suggestions on how to improve it, or how to fix some of these issues, or even what they would like to see. It's always just "Who wants a wifi light switch anyway?" or "Oh great now my door lock can freeze".
If it's so easy, why don't more companies do it? Why didn't Nest build their thermostats so that when the battery runs out, it reverts to a "dumb" thermostat instead of turning off your heat? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/bug-nest-t...
It's clearly more work to do it that way, as you'd need multiple "layers" of firmware/code which all need to communicate and run on their own, but i personally see that as insurance against the exact situation you are describing.
Nest is far from what i'd consider a good IOT company. They are the epitome of vendor lock in, proprietary and buggy code, and shitty support.
The thing I don't get with 'control everything with your smartphone!' is that people don't think about everyday use. It's like the people that design these products don't look at the actual, repeated use cases. Why would I want to pull my phone out of my pocket, unlock it, find the app I need, launch the app, wait for it to connect, hit the buttons I want....
(Even when I'm on Android and I can have an IoT control widget on my homescreen, that's still pulling the phone out, switching it on, unlocking it with my fingerprint, finding the page, hitting the button.... oops I forgot to turn Wi-Fi back on, better do that....)
I think IoT is great, but to do a great job at it you need to design the product with that in mind to begin with. The whole architecture of the product has to fit (see again, Hue). Sure, picking an Android tablet is easy, but why would you architect all that complexity? Why not a touchscreen device with a really simple real-time OS that does only what it needs to do?
I'm confident that this will all be self-correcting in the end. Consumers and 'the market' are smarter than we give them credit for. Certainly it takes a long time for them to react, but I think that when enough of the public is jaded by 'bad IoT' and the fad phase has passed, the actually good IoT products will survive and those companies that really think about their designs as a whole will be rewarded.
Very few actually pull operating current from the 24v C wire if it even exists on the given system. If it doesn't, R (the switched 24v power for Heat and Cold signals) isn't guaranteed to continually have current. Only when your Heat is turned on (probably a standard toggle lightswitch on the side of your furnace) will there be current on the Rh line, and only when your AC is enabled (possibly a breaker shunt on the side of your house near the condenser unit in a small box) will there be current on the Rc line.
Nest tries to recharge it's battery by trickling the C wire, if available, and if not it will try to charge off of one of the R wires, either during normal operation, or it will try and "pulse" the heat signal to pull a little bit of current to keep going. Thermostats were designed at a time where they didn't even consume any electricity on their own. We're trying to retrofit computers into signaling system, not a circuit.
The GP is right: most new thermostats don't take power from the 24VAC line. That surprised me when my heat wouldn't come on one morning because the battery was too weak to pull in the relay for more than a few seconds. That's what I get for ignoring the "low battery" warning! All my previous electronic thermostats only used the battery as a backup.
In any case, are you really saying that using a toxic metal (mercury), or an imprecise bimetallic strip is really an improvement over a simple $10 electronic thermostat?
A dumb digital thermostat is just a thermocouple and a relay, which you could rig together with very little EE knowledge and a weekend with an Arduino.
This is exactly the sentiment i was talking about though.
If you buy a car that had a faulty AC unit, do you just swear off cars altogether because "they all have shitty AC"?
Why do so many people like to bring up bugs/issues with poor iot devices and act like it is something that can't be improved or fixed?
But it hasn't been that long at all, and there are people doing it right.
The problem is that they are expensive and don't offer the same amount of features that some people want.
Take the "traditional" smarthome networks like z wave and friends.
I have a z wave light switch that works as a lightswitch 100% of the time. I actually installed the switches before i had a controller for them.
Add a controller and you have a "smarthome".
Connect that controller to your wifi and you have the ability to control these things safely from within your own network using anything from a bash script to shitty iphone apps.
Connect that network to the internet through a firewall and an authentication system and you now can control all of that stuff securely across the planet.
If any one of those breaks, functionality is reduced. Internet is down, i can't control it outside the house. Controller goes down, i can't control them as groups or from within the house but still "remotely". But it will literally always turn on/off the lights when i hit the switch. I don't need to worry about the security of a cheap chinese zwave knockoff thing because the controller is that gatekeeper.
That's IOT done right.
But people don't want to pay the money for that, they don't want to pay an electrician to come out and install them across the whole house, they don't care about security or what happens when the internet is down, they want a light they can control from their phone for as cheap as possible as fast as possible. And of course when people are asking for a product, manufacturers are going to make it.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/smart-fridge-only-capable-o...
http://www.vgg.com/et/et_030701_TVCrash.html
Fifteen years ago. Wow, I love the way I gave Jini a shout-out.
Nothing in remote/automatic updates requires being brickable. Don't buy such a crappy fridge.
Or, call a serviceman to fixe it, just like you would today with dumb fridge.
You need to do it right from day #1.
I don't have enough knowledge of the stage the OP's startup was to have answered, so I stand corrected.
These days, this is the kind of thing I negotiate up front. When they ask me how long something will take, I explain that they can have a prototype quickly, but only if they promise to throw it away as soon as the experiment is done. I explain that they can have me build a movie set or a real house, but that there's nothing in between. [1] And then I leave the choice up to them, explaining that it's really about their business judgement.
Generally people keep their promises on this, although sometimes it takes a little reminding. When they do, the business benefits are substantial. A good product person really benefits from doing quick, cheap experiments. And they also benefit from having a solid platform of high-reliability code for production use. But they can only get the benefits of both if they're careful not to mix the two.
[1] There is actually something between, but they don't want it: http://agilefocus.com/2009/06/22/the-3-kinds-of-code/
Prototypes-become-products is a trope much like _The Mythical Man Month_. We all nod knowingly when it is mentioned, we all know how it will turn out, and then we (well, management dictates that we...) turn right around and do the opposite.
In truth it's much much more like how Google just has computers trying to index every site on the internet that they can find. Most of the attacks these days are broad searching things, just testing every exploit they can against every site they can.
Also, seriously, Google will find and index those GET+DELETE non idempotent URLs and ruin their day.
Here is the professional ethics piece of a talk I gave last year to a developer meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj196NhPyWs&t=43m36s
The difference between you and the dunces building things like this hotel light system is that you know that there's a problem and will work to fix it. As the market matures, security will become more important. But the only companies with the chance to fix it will be the ones with substantial market share. And the people who will fix it best will be the ones, like you, thinking about security from the beginning. But that can only happen if people like you get in early and lay down the infrastructure in a way where security will at least be possible.
What could possibly go wrong?
- Sous vide normally uses a water bath at a controlled low temperature over a long period of time.
- Hike the temperature up past the boiling point, and the water is evaporated, allowing you to hike the temperature up to ignition points.
- Or, cycle the electronics fast enough to overload the power supply. If it isn't designed well, either the wall circuit blows or the power supply bursts into flame.
- In any case, the expectation of a long unattended cooking process means that human observers might not be in the loop.
Even without deliberate hackers, the device needs to contend with software errors, running without water, or a stuck relay that could leave it boiling dry and overheating.
- VW's dieselgate (although that was intentional)
- Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise crash
(yes, designed for a skilled operator, but still: no interlock on the brake)
- Pyranha Moulding's industrial oven [1]
- Hotpoint tumble-dryers catching fire [2]
Perhaps 35 years ago computer control was still very new, but right now, IoT is very new, so there's a whole new world of mistakes to learn from, and the evidence is very clear: serious mistakes are being made.
[1] http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/latest_news/pyranha_mouldings_ltd/
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35744313