I didn't notice a negative tone at all when he talked about the firmwares being publicly hosted. You did?
Here, I'll emphasize the words that elicit the tone:
> After some basic reversing of the Tapo Android app, I found out that TP-Link have their entire firmware repository in an open S3 bucket. No authentication required. So, you can list and download every version of every firmware they’ve ever released for any device they ever produced: [command elided] The entire output is here, for the curious. This provides access to the firmware image of every TP-Link device - routers, cameras, smart plugs, you name it. A reverse engineer’s candy store.
Highlighting (repeatedly) the ease and breadth of access is a basic writing technique to illustrate the weakness of a security system.
Replace [firmware] with [random popular GitHub repo] and nobody would blink. Replace [firmware] with [customer email address] and it would be a legal case. Differentiating here is important.
Furthermore, the repeated use of every when discussing the breadth of access seems like it would easily fall into the "absolutes are absolutely wrong" way of thinking. At least without some careful auditing it seems like another narrative flourish to marvel at this treasure trove (candy store) of firmware images that has been left without adequate protection. But it seems like most here agree that such protection is without merit, so why does it warrant this emphasis? I'm only left with the possible thought that the author considered it significant.
Sure an open bucket is bad, if it's stuff you weren't planning on sharing with the whole world anyway.
But how is an open, read-only S3 bucket worse than a read-only HTTPS site hosting exactly the same data?
The only thing I can see is that it is much easier to make it writeable by accident (for HTTPS web site or API, you need quite some implementation effort).
Only to gullible, clueless types.
Full blown production SPAs are served straight from public access S3 buckets. The only hard requirement is that the S3 bucket enforces read-only access through HTTPS. That's it.
Let's flip it the other way around and make it a thought experiment: what requirement do you think you're fulfilling by enforcing any sort of access restriction?
When you feel compelled to shit on a design trait, the very least you should do is spend a couple of minutes thinking about what problem it solves and what are the constraints.
I'm not shitting on anything except the wording in the article.
I guess I didn't word it clearly.
In our company we don't really serve directly from open buckets but through cloudfront. Though this is more because we are afraid of buckets marked open by mistake so they are generally not allowed. But I agree there's nothing bad about it. I just meant it sounds much worse (at least to someone in cybersec like me) and I don't like the effect used as such in the article.
When in fact TP-Link is doing the right thing with keeping older versions available. So this risks some higher up there thinking 'fuck it, we can't win, might as well close it all off'.
It's a firmware distribution system. It's read-only access to a public storage account designed to provide open access to software deployment packages that the company wishes to broadcast to all products. Of course there is no auth requirement at all. The system is designed to allow everyone in the world to install updates. What compells anyone to believe the system would be designed to prevent public access?
I don't see why. Support for firmware upgrades literally involve querying available packages and downloading the latest ones (i.e., apply upgrades). Either you use something like the S3 interface, or you waste your time implementing a clone of what S3 already supports.
Sometimes simple is good, specially when critics can't even provide any concrete criticism.