Lovense: The Company That Lies to Security Researchers | Hacker News Reader

Lovense: The Company That Lies to Security Researchers

bobdahacker.com

60 pointscampuscodi21 comments

Am I crazy or does all of that look ridiculously over engineered for what they actually provide? It looks like the 4-5 devs wanted to build something fancy like the big boys would, without having the manpower to deal with the overhead.

These kinds of issues usually arise because complex technologies are introduced, mostly by following some basic tutorials and light googling, without anyone actually understanding what that random NPM package (speaking a protocol of which they have at best a rudimentary understanding) actually does to communicate with the rust crate the other guy pulled.

I don't doubt their entire service could be a monolithic, small, and easily comprehensible node app running on some consumer PC hardware at the company HQ. You're never going to outgrow that in their business. It'd likely run off a macbook with some engineering discipline.

Instead it's probably a confusing mess of microservices in a Kubernetes cluster, each running in its own Docker container for "isolation", glued together with some YAML magic and a few bash scripts, tunneling XMPP over gRPC "because it's faster", behind an Istio mesh someone half-configured, talking to a bunch of managed cloud services across AWS and GCP "for redundancy", with Redis caches scattered around "just in case", logs streaming into three different observability tools (none of them fully set up), CI/CD powered by GitHub Actions triggering Terraform deployments through a Slack bot, autoscaling turned on "with default settings", and of course there's a blockchain component for audit logs - though no one remembers why - and a colocated 96-core fifteen-thousand dollar server running a cron job that updates a config file in S3 every hour "to keep things in sync".

Too bad the entire thing relies on those JIDs containing PII now, which everyone is afraid of changing. The solution? Slap another micro-service in front that translates them to something else. Devs have been unsuccessfully trying to get exactly that deployed for weeks now. But cut them some slack: getting shit done is hard when you're overqualified for your job.

You absolutely nailed it. As the researcher who found these vulns, I can confirm the over-engineering is real.

They literally had internal user IDs (ofId) already implemented and working, but kept the email-based JIDs for "legacy support." The entire XMPP system could have used these internal IDs from day one.

The "14 months to fix" claim was even more ridiculous when you realize the fix was just... using the IDs they already had. No architectural changes needed. They even admitted they had a 1-month fix ready but chose not to deploy it.

Your microservice translation layer guess is scary accurate - that's essentially what their "v2" endpoints were trying to do. They created new HTTP endpoints that used internal JIDs instead of email-based ones, but the XMPP layer still exposed everything, making the whole effort pointless.

The best part? After going public, they implemented the "impossible" fix in 48 hours. Turns out you don't need 14 months when the Internet is watching.

Hi HN, I'm the researcher who found these vulnerabilities. Happy to answer questions.

A few clarifications on the technical side:

The XMPP issue wasn't just about JIDs containing emails - it was that their roster sync actively linked internal IDs to real email JIDs. Even their "v2" endpoints that tried to hide emails were useless because the XMPP layer still exposed everything.

Regarding the "14 months to fix" claim - they actually had the fix ready (they admitted they could do it in 1 month) but chose not to deploy it for "legacy support." The fix they implemented after public pressure was exactly what I suggested months ago: just use the internal IDs they already had.

The most frustrating part was discovering other researchers reported these exact bugs in 2022 and 2023. Lovense told them it was "fixed" while paying them peanuts ($350 vs the $3000 they paid me for the same bugs).

Also, to address the over-engineering comment by chmod775 - you're spot on. They had internal user IDs (ofId) the whole time but maintained this complex dual system. The "architectural complexity" was self-inflicted.

That is beyond bad; some models using lovense have high privacy needs and probably don't know their equipment is so insecure. Even leaving account takeover aside, it is hard enough to fend off stalkers without them having your email.

Gotta honor high-profile privacy needs.

This is crazy bad, malpractice-level bad if this were a regulated profession.

"State-licensed teledildonicist."

This is what I come here for.

Like the author I would expect a lot more attention to privacy and security from a remote operated vibrating dong company.

I genuinely do not know whether you are being serious or sarcastic.

Serious but tongue in cheek. Their product and service naturally requires a somewhat higher level of personal privacy yet they seem to look at their own business as serving the horny freaks who don't deserve better.

They may be right in that their customers are probably not very privacy focused. The intersection between "people who connect sex toys to the internet" and "people who care a lot about privacy" is quite likely to be small.

I agree their attitude is pretty bad though. They should care about customers privacy with something like this.

> their customers are probably not very privacy focused.

Maybe. I think it's more like they are not tech literate (and also this Lovense thing is like google or microsoft for them. They can't not use it if they want to remain competitive.) If people go doxing a few high profile users, I am sure people will worry about their privacy a lot more.

Good point. I was thinking about normal users, which the site seems to be aimed at, but I can see its a much more of a risk for high profile users.

They're just another cheap IoT consumer electronics company. It's not that deep.

Assuming everything you reported is true (I'm not doubting you, I just don't have the time to test everything myself atm) this is actually insane behavior from the company.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250728145153/https://bobdahack... hugged to death

Why even have a bounty system in the first place if you're going to do this kind of thing?

For the optics of "we have a bug bounty system".

This type of behavior should honestly get the leaders of the company criminally charged, this is willful negligence. Assuming this is true (and it the blog post has enough receipts to assume that it is), this company should be forcibly dissolved by the government and the leadership criminally charged. This is absolutely ridiculous behavior in response to a security report.

  What are you in for?

  Murder 1. You?

  Didn't secure someones's buttplug properly

  Duuuude... you're a monster

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