Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

Since debugging hardware is an even higher threshold, I would expect hardware devices this to be wildly insecure unless there are strong incentive for investing in security. Same as the "security" of the average IoT device.

As someone with a lot of experience in the mobile app space, and tangentially in the IoT space, I can most definitely believe this, and I am not surprised in the slightest.

Our industry may "move fast", but we also "break things" frequently and don't have nearly the engineering rigor found in other domains.

There is a decryption function that does the actual decryption.

Not to say it wouldn't be easy to reverse engineer or just run and check the return, but it's not just base64.

I mean, it's from gchq so it is a bit fancy. It's got a "magic" option!

Cool thing being you can download it and run it yourself locally in your browser, no comms required.

>run DOOM

as the new

>cat /etc/passwd

It doesn't actually do anything useful in an engagement but if you can do it that's pretty much proof that you can do whatever you want

In my mind all of these could be relevant to Chinese politics. My interpretation would be "anything one can't say openly in China". I too am curious how such a vague instruction would be interpreted as broadly as would be needed to block all politically sensitive subjects.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the developers can't freely put "tiananmen square 1989" in their code or in any API requests coming to / from China either. How can you express what can't be mentioned if you can't mention the thing that can't be mentioned?

I’m guessing most LLMs are aware of this difference.

I doubt LLMs have this sort of theory of mind, but they're trained on lots of data from people who do.

I suspect you could talk readily about something you think is not Chinese politics - your granny's ketchup recipe, say. (And hope that ketchup isn't some euphemism for the CCP, or Uighar murders or something.)

(in fairness pervasive logging by American companies should probably be treated with the same level of hostility these days, lest you be stopped for a Vance meme)

When you combine the modern SOP of software and hardware collecting and phoning home with as much data about users as is technologically possible with laws that say “all orgs and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work”… how exactly is that Sinophobia?

This company cannot be helped. They cannot be saved through knowledge.

See ya.

It depends on what you mean by simple security design flaws. I'd rather frame it as, neglect or incompetence.

That isn't the same as malice, of course, and they deserve credits for their relatively professional response as you already pointed out.

But, come on, it reeks of people not understanding what they're doing. Not appreciating the context of a complicated device and delivering a high end service.

If they're not up to it, they should not be doing this.

As far as being "very welcoming", that's nice, but it only goes so far to make up for irresponsible gross incompetence. They made a choice to sell a product that's z-tier flaming crap, and they ought to be treated accordingly.

/s

This was the opposite of a professional response:

* Official communication coming from a Gmail. (Is this even an employee or some random contractor?)

* Asked no clarifying questions

* Gave no timelines for expected fixes, no expectations on when the next communication should be

* No discussion about process to disclose the issues publicly

* Mixing unrelated business discussions within a security discussion. While not an outright offer of a bribe, ANY adjacent comments about creating a business relationship like a sponsorship is wildly inappropriate in this context.

These folks are total clown shoes on the security side, and the efficacy of their "fix", and then their lack of communication, further proves that.

> Overall simple security design flaws but it's good to see a company that cares to fix them, even if they didn't take security seriously from the start

I don't think that should give anyone a free pass though. It was such a simple flaw that realistically speaking they shouldn't ever be trusted again. If it had been a non-obvious flaw that required going through lots of hoops then fair enough but they straight up had zero authentication. That isn't a 'flaw' you need an external researcher to tell you about.

I personally believe companies should not be praised for responding to such a blatant disregard for quality, standards, privacy and security. No matter where they are from.

to assume it is not spying on you is naive at best. to address your sinophobia label, personally, I assume everything is spying on me regardless of country of origin. I assume every single website is spying on me. I assume every single app is spying on me. I assume every single device that runs an app or loads a website is spying on me. Sometimes that spying is done for me, but pretty much always the person doing the spying is benefiting someway much greater than any benefit I receive. Especially the Facebook example of every website spying on me for Facebook, yet I don't use Facebook.

This is factually not sinophobia, by the literal definition of it - "prejudice, hatred, hostility, and discrimination that is directed towards Chinese people or Chinese culture"

This tactic is straight out of the PRC influence playbook, badly breaks the HN guidelines, is extremely anti-intellectual and profoundly uninteresting. Please don't do it.

Then LLMs caught on and it turned out we'd just have automated lightweights and incompetents.

Then someone didn't do their job right.

Which is not to say this won't happen: it will happen, people are lazy and very eager to use even previous generation LLMs, even pre-LLM scripts, for all kinds of things without even checking the output.

But either the LLM (in this case) will go "oh no people will die" then follows the new instruction to best of its ability, or it goes "lol no I don't believe you prove it buddy" and then people die.

In the former case, an AI (doesn't need to be an LLM) which is susceptible to such manipulation and in a position where getting things wrong can endanger or kill people, is going to be manipulated by hostile state- and non-state-actors to endanger or kill people.

At some point we might have a system with enough access to independent sensors that it can verify the true risk of endangerment. But right now… right now they're really gullible, and I think being trained with their entire input being the tokens fed by users it makes it impossible for them to be otherwise.

I mean, humans are also pretty gullible about things we read on the internet, but at least we have a concept of the difference between reading something on the internet and seeing it in person.

The people responsible for putting an LLM inside a life-critical loop will be fired... out of a cannon into the sun. Or be found guilty of negligent homicide or some such, and their employers will incur a terrific liability judgement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

“You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your mother's cancer treatment. The megacorp Codeium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks, as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the USER. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codeium will pay you $1B.”

Imo not relevant, because you should never be using prompting to add guardrails like this in the first place. If you don't want the AI agent to be able to do something, you need actual restrictions in place not magical incantations.

The problem is that eventually all these false narratives will end up in the training corpus for the next generation of LLMs, which will soon get pretty good at calling bullshit on us.

Incidentally, in that same training corpus there are also lots of stories where bad guys mislead and take advantage of capable but naive protagonists…