Echo Dots store a wealth of data, even after you reset them
wired.com
wired.com
Apple at least gets this right by encrypting everything in memory and then just rotating the key (and I think Android does this now too?). But that is complicated and expensive.
I guess those of us super concerned with privacy either shouldn't sell these devices used, or get a powerful magnet that can cause bit flips (or not buy these in the first place, but good luck living in a modern world without buying a device with NAND memory in it)!
And smart light bulbs
Complicated, maybe, but expensive? Once the software is written, there should be no more cost.
> a powerful magnet
A simpler approach is, before recycling electronics, a couple blows with a hammer on the circuit board ought to take care of it. Sure, a well-funded actor may still be able to retrieve something from the memory, but unless you are a very valuable target, nobody will find it worthwhile to reconstruct a shattered circuit board.
It's why I was always amused by people worrying that an electron microscope could retrieve data from a hard disk drive rewritten 6 times. Yah, nobody's going to do that.
I have no idea what a magnet is supposed to do to flash chips, though. I thought that only affects magnetic media like hard drives.
They'll just move on to an easier target.
It's like locking the door on your house. Sure, someone really wanting to get in will bypass it. Opportunistic criminals, which are the vast majority, will just move on. You just have to not be the slowest guy in the herd running away from the leopard.
You'd need to include a Secure Enclave chip or something like it in each device. That adds cost. I've worked with IOT hardware vendors before. They will argue with you over 128K of RAM because of the cost. Every extra chip, every ounce of weight hurts their profitability at scale.
> A simpler approach is, before recycling electronics, a couple blows with a hammer on the circuit board ought to take care of it.
But then you can't reuse it. The whole point is to resell it to avoid e-waste.
> It's why I was always amused by people worrying that an electron microscope could retrieve data from a hard disk drive rewritten 6 times. Yah, nobody's going to do that.
The NSA would do that to a recovered Russian or Chinese hard drive.
> a recovered Russian or Chinese hard drive
Bit by bit with an operator and an electron microscope, how long will it take to recover a 1 terabyte drive?
It just wouldn't protect against some physical attacks to an unreset device.
First, put it in a heavy-duty freezer ziplock bag and then place on concrete. This allows you to nicely pulverize the chips into many tiny pieces without making a mess. A hammer works well, but a few taps with a sledge hammer is even better and somehow more satisfying.
Could you elaborate? I'm not an expert in this area:
What makes this so complicated? As a non-expert in any moderate cryptography, it seems like it should be straightforward?
When you say expensive, do you mean computationally, dev time, or specialized hardware?
To to whoever answers for helping my curiosity.
Making sure all data access goes through an abstraction layer that transparently encrypts and decrypts data has some complex bits to it, especially the part about storing the encryption key safely and rotating it properly. It also complicates all the hardware programming because nothing gets direct access to storage anymore, which a lot of IOT devices assume they have.
> When you say expensive, do you mean computationally, dev time, or specialized hardware?
All three. Computationally it's not expensive per se, but it requires adding a few more chips and making the CPU a little more powerful to handle all of the encryption and decryption. In IOT devices, every chip and every KB of RAM counts, so adding that overhead to every device could be a deal breaker on its own. I've worked with IOT vendors and they push back on even small increases in RAM, because it hurts their profitability at scale.
Dev time of course is required to make all the software support the abstraction layer, and specialized hardware would be required to securely store the encryption key (maybe depending on how hard core you wanted to get).
- However bad you think the security on them might be at some level, it's worse. A "factory reset" won't reliably clear data, the devices can be tricked into leaking all sorts of stuff, etc.
- No matter what the company selling them says, if it has hardware of some variety, Chekhov's Gun applies - at some point, that hardware will be used.
- You will be disappointed by the supported hardware life in terms of software updates. It will seem like someone has just gotten bored with updating it and doesn't care about the ewaste they're generating. That "last supported firmware" will eventually either have a massive security issue discovered (Western Digital is a recent example) or will talk to APIs that simply stop working at some point (I believe some Samsung "Smart Fridges" suffered this death).
There's no good reason to install this sort of stuff in a modern house if you care the slightest bit about privacy.
Modern iOS devices are fairly resistant to data extraction - secure enclaves and such, and I wasn't talking about them. I don't know the state of Android security at the hardware level these days. Some years back, it was quite poor.
That said, if you admin a group of users, a surprising number do not care about security. Turn on google's advanced protection - you will get more complaints than compliments as an example at the extra annoyances it introduces.
Even for me, apple is now rediculous with its prompts for permissions. I've had to say yes 10+ times to get an apple watch setup. So the twitter mob messes things up by their "outrage" attacks. There should be one button, I'm OK with my apple devices tracking me (health, heart rate, sleep, steps etc etc). I wish the twitter mob would focus less on this sort of thing and more on the real bad actors (buying a TV, then it later starts tracking you, then starts pushing ads to you on your fully paid device).
One problem is just that google / apple etc make much better outrage targets, so I think we've got this weird distortion - lots of gaping holes, and then constant attacks against Apple / Google.