The future of Flipper Zero development

  > why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.

Because it's still useful to have a blessed child so that people getting into the space have somewhere to start. You could accept zero additional PRs and it would still be a useful thing to have.

The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.

But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers

Yeah, they do, but an actually fair to all sides model is that of one-time sales coupled with optional paid-for updates.

What's funny, or maybe sad, is that this used to be a solved problem back in the CD-distribution era of software. You buy the software once (or in this case the hardware that comes with a software license). You get bugfix patches and minor updates for a year. Next year the next version releases with major new features, and you either pay the price of an update or you stay on the version you are on. Good incentives for all sides. Development stays aligned with existing users, because otherwise they just stop buying updates. And in return the developer gets predictable revenue.

Then Minecraft pioneered the model of users paying once and getting free lifetime updates. And shortly thereafter various SaaS pioneered the model of the user paying monthly while the software barely changes.

And somehow we pretend like those two business models aren't both broken, and like the first one somehow doesn't work anymore

Donating to a russian company with all the sanctions in place?

has that ever worked, ever?

I've heard people talk about this "solution" for over a decade, especially with crypto trying to justify itself, but I've never seen it successful.

This

In my experience this doesn't work because people in large groups usually demand maintenance for free and donate explicitly for features they personally want.

You usually end up with insufficient donations to move anything, but now gained a bunch of users who think they own the devs and complain about every change which isn't that one thing they donated for...

Much easier fix: They already open-sourced everything, the official branch is sufficiently stable and feature-rich. People are free to fork and create something new, decoupled from the Flipper team and maybe even financed by donations if they want to.

Sent!

You guys have done such a good job that I've thought about buying one even though I don't need one at all just to support the project.

You've surely launched a generation of perhaps-someday-responsible hackers into the world.

Was just reading something along those lines:

https://infosec.exchange/@millie/115719943870742405

> We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.

Especially since, as that article describes, the "firmware" has a much more limited scope that it used to, now being mostly a loader for app rather that providing user functions.

Worrying about firmware development resources for a Flipper Zero seems a bit like concentrating on your bios instead of ongoing updates to Linux and the applications you use. Yeah, it's important, but it's probably exceedingly rare for the firmware here to need to change much.

why it should?

That's because we haven't yet started to laugh people out of the room that get uneasy and complain when the rate of updates of something starts slowing down.

I don’t know a whole lot about RFID, but some of the most basic cards can be copied very easily. When scanned, the reader always reads the same bits.

I believe there are some more secure cards, like Mifare DESFire EV3 that do provide some security. You’d be shocked how insecure most RFID readers for security cards are.

RFID keys vary from utterly dumb ID-based, to hackable challenge-response, to actual NFC smartcard (very rare).

Some of that can be trivially cloned.

Depends on where you are. Newer systems are resistant to attack, but not everywhere has upgraded to newer systems.

Keyfobs absolutely should use a secure challenge-response protocol in order to prevent cloning. Unfortunately, it's extremely common for RFID devices to simply use the tag ID which is trivially cloneable. Many of the systems that make some attempt at security still fail by using a broken protocol or a flawed implementation.

Most dont :)

Oh yeah that’s how you’re supposed to do it. But it’s entirely possible to set up a system that uses RFID key fobs that uh, doesn’t.

In the case where it was most useful to make copies they did eventually replace the system with one where the keys weren’t copy able. Which was better!

Some cards don't have any form of security. For example Konami "e-amusement" cards are just an ID number, which is also written on the back of the card. It is a username so to speak, the password is the PIN you enter when you start the game.

Some cards use some kind of challenge-response but are weak and are easily crackable.

Some cards have an anti-copy protection based on rolling codes, be careful with these. The idea is that when you use it to, say, open a door, the card sends a code to the reader and if correct, that code is burned and the reader replies with the next code, which is stored in the card for the next time, making every other copy (possibly including the original) unusable. If the card emulator doesn't store the rolling code, you are completely locked out.

Some cards have a proper challenge-response mechanism that works and can't be easily copied.

Many RFID cards are literally just an ID number, and will happily allow you to copy that number to your own RFID card (look up "blue cloner guns", although they have their own downsides). Basically just security through obscurity. Cards that do fancy crypto stuff exist, but odds are your workplace badge, apartment fob, or hotel room key is the simple kind (because those are cheaper)

In my old apartment I was able to copy my fob from my apartment office. In my new one I had to record the interaction with the door and was then able to open the door

You're thinking of NFC, not RFID, and with NFC the owner might not have changed the default keys.

It's a common mix-up (people barely differentiate between the terms anymore, though I'm surprised nobody in 2 hours mentioned it yet), basically RFID is (historically) an ID; a username. Like an ID field in a database. NFC is near-field communication: bidirectional. It does challenge-response and typically runs on hardened chips. But yeah people will call NFC chips RFID and RFID chips NFC all the time. Both are waterproof devices doing radio transmissions on wireless power and you can't tell them apart without using some equipment to try and read the chip type (even if most phones can do that nowadays), so I can understand the terminology generalisation

Even that process can be flawed, see: Crypto1 and all the shenanigans that followed.

Recent UL-C/AES disclosure too IIRC

As others have said, most are dumb, some just slightly less so. A few captured nonce values and a dictionary attack will crack most with ease.

> I don't think I would use it enough to justify the investment

This is not a rational purchase - most of the rule breaking done with the zero is for fun or convenience, rather than being truly illegal.

It used to be more fun before the hotels started handing out NFC unlocks with your phone.

Still, being able to send each other a key for a hotel room on Signal is a nice trick if you are traveling with a sufficiently tech savvy group of people.

Nope! Only occasionally. But it’s handy on those occasions.

You can't even clone you garage door opener key anyway.

Flipper Zero and its clones have always been pseudohacker nonsense. Fun little party trick I suppose.

IMO for garage much easier to just add garage door opener that works from your phone.

If you just want to clone a typical garage door remote, you're way better off buying a generic $5 fob. Almost all the 433MHz garage fobs I've seen are designed to easily clone each other. And if cloning doesn't work, it's probably because you need to access the door controller and hit a few buttons to pair the remote directly. Also trivial, and also often pretty physically insecure. In the smaller apartment buildings I've lived in, the boxes containing these control units have usually just been hidden behind by a couple of screws and a "danger electricity" sticker.

If your current remote has multiple unused buttons on it as they often do, you can already try this out.

Can you outline the process here? What transmitters do you use with esp32?

I think of it as the browser dev tools of radio. Most people will have no use for it but it brings visibility and interactability in to an otherwise invisible world.

i vibed a .ir to tasmota IRSend commands and it is so good.

I'm currently using https://momentum-fw.dev/

Works well, and compiling modules like the epaper hacker tool is easy.

https://github.com/i12bp8/TagTinker

Its one thing to have a skid come in going "I wanna hack the RFID on the gubbmints's doors how can i do that?"

Versus "we forked the firmware to include a wide range of pentesting tools"

And then get banned for even saying the alternate firmware.

And seriously, this little thing is a wonderful hacker multitool. You can seriously fuck shit up with the hardware they included. For fucks sake, thats WHY they created it.

This. Many legit, but questionable features blown out of proportion already caused many issues with regulators who just don't want to get into details, but just delist from sales/ban the device.

And once you start talking about "jamming" and other 1337 h4x0r stuff - which is straight up illegal and can get you into trouble - on official platforms, don't get offended when that gets removed.

Nyet.

On aliexpress there are but I can't vouch for their quality