Technology

60115 readers

2591 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Former NSA cyberspy's not-so-secret hobby – Xmas light hacks (www.theregister.com)

submitted 2 days ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/technology@lemmy.world

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] demesisx@infosec.pub 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Unless your lights are hard-wired or connecting to a locked down guest WiFi network, you are exposing your WiFi credentials to potential attackers.

The microcontrollers that control Christmas lights are riddled with backdoors and holes.

That’s probably the real reason that this piece of shit NSA spook wants everyone to have smart Christmas lights.

[–] socphoenix@midwest.social 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The security researcher, LimitedResults, coordinated disclosure with Espressif on their advisory and details of the exploit. The attack works against eFuse, a one-time programmable memory where data can be burned to the device.

By burning a payload into the device’s eFuse, no software update can ever reset the fuse and the chip must be physically replaced or the device discarded. A key risk is that the attack does not fully replace the firmware, so the device may appear to work as normal.

Why does a random esp32 chip need efuses in the first place??

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It's designed and implemented for copy protection. Otherwise you can design a esp32 device that includes software you've written and 15 minutes later a clone device with exactly the same software will appear on <insert Chinese electronics website here>

[–] socphoenix@midwest.social 1 points 4 hours ago

I mostly understand how these fuses prevent say downgrading firmware, but could t a Chinese firm looking to clone one of these also just clone the number of blow. Fuses equally trivially if the goal is just an also working device with stock firmware?