Despite being a nerd from way back that had a 2400 baud modem in my c64, I have avoided IOT devices as long as possible, precisely for the reasons that the author describes (privacy, security, and failure to distinguish between service or object).
However, sometimes it becomes unavoidable. After a recent diagnosis with sleep apnea, I got a cpap machine, which has a cellular network connection in it, which connects to a centralized service where the sleep technicians can tune the device to deliver the right pressure for my sleeping patterns. What it also did was allow my insurance company to know how much I was using the device, in order to decide whether it was going to pay for it or not.
So, I really don't see how I could have avoided this IOT device and received treatment.
On the other hand, no hacker is going to be able to compromise my network via this device, so maybe this truly is a better path forward for IOT devices?
It's chilling how casually we have allowed something as essential and personal as a medical device to inform on us to someone we have a fundamentally adversarial business relationship to.
Do the insurance company's intercoms also send you recordings of their meetings so you can check if they're conspiring to illegally deny coverage, or is the spying strictly one-way?
I don’t think this is casual or just “allowed”. The insurance company holds all the cards here. The choice is between getting treated or not for a great many people.
I got my machine from a local company that does the monitoring and configuration by mailing an SD card back and forth. I suspect my sleep patterns still end up in a database somewhere but at least it’s not real-time.
The insurance company will also be a lot less antsy about monitoring if you buy the machine out-of-pocket, which brings up another issue with pervasive IOT: opting out is, if even possible, more expensive, making it potentially yet another modern method of class striation.
>However, sometimes it becomes unavoidable. After a recent diagnosis with sleep apnea, I got a cpap machine, which has a cellular network connection in it, which connects to a centralized service where the sleep technicians can tune the device to deliver the right pressure for my sleeping patterns.
I too have such a device. I did a little (<5 minutes) research and was able to access the device's settings to disable the cellular modem.
The manufacturer complained about this to me and I told them to go fuck themselves. My insurance company never even asked about it.
> On the other hand, no hacker is going to be able to compromise my network via this device, so maybe this truly is a better path forward for IOT devices?
But on the other hand, your network has already been compromised, in the sense that you have a connected device within your home that you cannot control at all, that connects to the internet as long as it has power and can do whatever it is programmed to do...
Maybe for a sleep apnea machine this isn't catastrophic, but consider this Ubiquiti hack that's in the news; it wouldn't surprise me if the security situation around medical stuff isn't any better than with a networking company, after all.
Me, I want to control what's connected in my house. At least a little.
I think they meant it connects via a cellular network rather than wifi, so even if it were compromised it couldn't do anything to devices on the internal network. So security breaches are limited to the one device, and doesn't provide an opening to other devices.
I had a ResMed CPAP that came with a wifi attachment that plugs into the machine. However the machine also had an SD card slot and recorded the usage data and some diagnostics to the card; the data on the card provides proof that the patient is using the machine. There was no requirement to use the wifi attachment. I never used it. All the physicians I have seen always ask for the SD card. If you have Windows you can download the ResMed software to read the card yourself.
Are the newer machines not using SD cards anymore?
Also I have always wondered if anyone has opened up and tinkered with the ResMed wifi attachment. Perhaps it could be used as general purpose hardware.
As far as I know the SD cards are still standard, even on connected machines. Everybody is working on connectivity but on medical devices it's pretty hard because of regulations you need hosting accreditation for health data and specific anonymization processes and even then it doesn't mean you have a right to use the data you collect. In my opinion it's the one industry where IOT would be a boon to society, it'd enable medical research in a huge way. We put so many protections in place to protect people's health data, and paradoxically insurers have a easier time getting access to it than the scientists who do medical research.
I'd encourage anyone in this thread using a mechanical ventilator to donate their respiratory data anonymously. If you look for respiratory data online you'll see it's meager what's openly available, and hospitals/doctors who do this kind of research guard their datasets fiercely, not because of privacy concerns mind you since they're anonymized but because it gives them a competitive advantage.
To really hammer home what I'm talking about, if tonight you extracted your data from that SD cards and you published the recordings from your last 10 nights of breathing with your machine you'd create one the largest open respiratory datasets online. It'd take 1 to 2 years for a medical researcher with industry or hospital backing to go through the process to have the right to gather this kind of data on a patient.
The article casually and dismissively mentions living inside a Faraday cage... but can we entertain this notion for a moment?
If one is already building a new house from scratch, it would seem trivial to make the whole thing a Faraday cage while you're at it, no? Am I missing something?
Retrofitting an existing house would be harder, but still doable if one is committed to the cause, like a couple thousand bucks tops? (Guessing here.)
It doesn't seem that one would have to give up ANY actually desired functionality. Wired internet piercing the cage is not an issue, right? After that you can just have your own secured wifi inside. If one is okay with using VoIP for voice calls, the problem is now solved, yes?
Add a second AP outside if you also need Wifi in the backyard or whatever.
As a technical solution to a social problem this has at least two downsides. It puts the cost on the consumer and it's a battle fought on unfavorable terms.
I can easily imagine that it will be harder for you to get the stuff repaired/supported, as in "I cannot see your dishwasher in our system and it's your problem".
I'm not saying you should not do that, I'm saying that it has little power compared to political action.
Regulation is worth only as much as its enforcement, and ... not all EU countries are up to that challenge. Just look at how lax the enforcement against Facebook is.
I wish I understood how Europe blunted the political power of large business lobbies to such a larger degree than the rest of the capitalist world. I wonder whether a key factor is the British use of crown corporations in expanding its empire and the legacy that left in the English speaking world.
In any case, I suppose GDPR is a hopeful sign, but here in NorAm it actually seems more plausible to become an oligarch first and then make one's political wishes known then than to have any kind of political impact as a middle-class citizen.
In Europe, the common man accepts more social control over his life than the American common man, likely due to the feudal history of the Old World. Looking at median purchasing power and social mobility in France / Germany / Italy, I would argue they are still serfs, modified only by a lack of knowledge of their own slavery.
If they're poor (by PPP), less mobile (it's harder to gain appreciable wealth in Europe due to insane taxes, i.e. their feudal contributions), less free, and governed by Nietzschean slave morals, how are they not serfs?
I'm gonna go with: I can choose not to work for my "owner". (you can argue if you want to be extreme that I'd have to leave Europe, but I could do that.)
Also, I get healthcare whether or not I'm employed, so that's nice.
I guess everybody is a serf to some state unless they live in anarchy - you pay your taxes for protection (military) and infrastructure in most places. In some of those places you don't even get either of those things for your tax money.
As for if the particular state I live in gives me freedom - yes, I think so. For context, I'm in Germany but not a German.
(Currently, due to being on a visa, I can't really, but:) I would be comfortable quitting my job without anything lined up if I were a permanent resident or citizen.
I feel comfortable being an atheist (which is not the case where I'm from), I'm happy speaking out, and I'm happy to have two way conversations with people who have different opinions. I do not need to toe any line to be kept safe in society or not be persecuted by the state (edit: extreme views aside)
I'd say I'm free, yes.
On to your point about being a serf to the state rather than a corporation: do you really prefer it being that way? Has the last year of unemployment, etc, not highlighted a weakness in having things so tightly coupled to having a job?
All said - I think there's probably a middle ground where things makes sense, and many "western" countries fall in there with the state providing the basics and private companies filling in the gaps in demand, the only problem is when that gap in demand is something that's basically a human right.
Gaining appreciable wealth (true social mobility) is very, very hard in Europe. The US is very successful in comparison with creating multi-millionaires out of otherwise normal or middle class folks.
I reckon part of it is that the US and other colonies were basically sandboxes where (pre-)capitalist ideas could be build from scratch and deeply enrgained in the collective mindset over time. In Europe it had to be established over a much larger population (or at least one were you have to hold back to a degree with supression) and capitalism faced much more competition and backslash from the people right from the start and resulted in more of a batchwork of different ideas.
At least anecdotally, when I talk to an average European vs US American, what e.g. their views about what restrictions for businesses are acceptable or even desirable, I get very different answers.
I'm sure that's part of it. Another hypothesis I like is that the US was populated to a significant extent by people who, when faced with problems at home, didn't stay and fight to fix them but instead preferred to leave.
In addition to migration patterns that selected implicitly for such folk, this happened internally to the US as part of the movement to colonize ever further west.
Now, there hasn't been anywhere else left to go for a while, but society hasn't really internalised this yet.
The grand parent was talking about a faraday cage build into the house. That only stops wireless communication so I'm guessing he's talking about devices that use the mobile network to phone home.
So no, it's not possible to let some things through. Not even your phone will get a connection. (Besides the ones that originate inside the house, like wlan)
Something like a micro-cell tower inside the house hooked up to the wired connection, with explicit black/white listing for the devices you do or don't want?
The stucco houses you see in the US Southwest have chicken wire as part of the wall material, and it provides a significant Faraday-cage factor for free. We discovered this around the 2009 DTV transition when we realized it was outdoor-antenna-or-nothing.
I was actually thinking that reading the article. You could build yourself a faraday cage around the house, and inside you have wifi and a femtocell. The issue comes when you have balconies / patios / laws that you want connectivity in, but the solution here is to set up wifi access points both inside and outside and you should have full coverage.
A while back, my family living in the countryside of Europe were upset about a cell tower going up right next door. My uncles are a physicist and a microcontroller chip designer respectively, so after trying to fight the build for a while, they worked out at the time that the 50cm distance in the rebar in the house construction would work as a somewhat effective faraday cage for the frequency bands of the tower. I'm not sure if that was actually that effective, and is likely no longer the case, but I do remember having pretty nasty reception indoors in the early days.
If you have extremely reliable home internet I suppose it's viable, but personally I've found the redundancy of being able to fall back to hotspotted mobile data when required extremely important.
You can put an external mobile modem and make it a failover wan connection. That way you still control the network via your wifi equipment but have that still available.
What is the faraday cage achieving then? Any device in your home can connect to the cell network anyway. Sure, they probably can't connevt to satellite anymore, but I doubt that it is extremely popular.
I thought the purpose was for ypur phone to be able to connect to the cell network, for example for (non-VoIP) calls. But, if your phone can connect, so can any other sim-enabled device.
No, the comment you replied to seems to be talking about using the cell network as a fallback for Internet access. That's why the stipulated an antenna on the outside of the house.
I was assuming that it meant having their phone fall back to the cell network when WiFi is iffy, and I was pointing out that this would require breaching the faraday cage entirely essentially.
As someone who's built commercial RF test enclosures on the scale of a house, "trivial" is not a word I would use.
Putting shielding foil in the walls is quite straightforward. Putting mesh in the windows and doors, or using solid metal doors, too.
Connecting the moving parts of the windows and doors, to the walls, in a continuous way that maintains a useful amount of RF shielding, is absolutely devilish.
Basically you end up with conductive doorjambs, which can't be aluminum because it makes a thin oxide layer over itself which is not conductive. They can't be stainless steel, which does the same. They can't be plain steel, because it rusts, or copper, because it tarnishes. You're left with brass, gold, or silver as your options. (Or, try aluminum and just use massive contact areas, so the joint functions as a capacitor across the oxide layer, which is effectively a conductor at RF even if not at DC.)
The corners of everything are murder. The soft flexible bits of "weatherstripping" are most subject to damage, and everyone who opens the door has to be trained on what parts not to touch, or how to re-fluff and repair whatever happens. You can make a notched overlapping sort of structure, but you end up with a 4-foot-wide door that opens on an articulated hinge to reveal a 3-foot-wide opening, or a bank-vault-style giant lever that operates a mechanism to engage the door seals. Or a fairly normal looking door with substandard performance and you put a few of 'em in series in an "airlock" sort of structure.
Doorjambs are a special challenge, since you want the jamb to be fairly low so you don't trip on it, and so you can roll equipment in and out. But that means all the sealing has to be part of the door, and you really want that vault-style compression mechanism. Or, you have a small high-jamb door that humans can step over, and a separate large equipment opening that you only open once in a while and just re-seal the perimeter with copper tape every time you close it.
Getting wires in and out is also a chore, though there are products for this, they're expensive. Without a proper passthrough, every wire that penetrates the envelope is basically an antenna that re-radiates signal on the other side. A single fire-alarm wire is enough to pass quite a lot of wifi signal! And good luck getting the fire AHJ to accept your notion of shoving a bunch of additional components on their wire to filter this RF stuff that they have no idea about. Got a safety cert for that?
AC likewise needs filtering, and the more power you're moving, the beefier the filters are. And the bigger they are in a physical-dimension sense, the harder it is to get them to perform at high (GHz-plus) frequencies, because the individual geometric features are resonant. You can't throw money at this problem, it's physics, so you just have to get clever. One approach is to put the breaker panel outside the enclosure and pass individual circuits through, since each individual one has lower current requirements and the filters are smaller.
Mind you, this is not a theoretical or absurdist "we want to block everything" exercise. Until the guy with the spectrum analyzer showed up, our quick test during assembly was just firing up a phone and seeing if we could link to the wifi AP on the other side of the enclosure wall, exactly the real-world scenario you propose. Every measure I've described here was necessary, and if we screwed up a single detail, we'd get wifi signal back.
It can be done. It's neither cheap nor easy. It helps if you have good test equipment and a lot of intuition for how RF behaves. And a massive, massive box of copper tape.
Okay so there is something I actually do desperately want.
I want a way to spoof GPS signals within my own home such that devices e.g. my phones cannot geolocate themselves using GPS, or get a reading with a pre-defined wrong location.
At the same time, I don't want to affect devices outside my home.
It doesn't need to fill my home either, I'd be happy with a PCB that be stuck to the back of my phone or in a backpack that does this for a 30cm radius.
Do you even really get GPS inside your home? Maybe next to a window, but GPS signals don't usually make it indoors. If you're tracked indoors it may be because your WiFi router was scanned by Google or something.
As for jamming it, I think most GPS receivers probably saturate at around -60 dBm in band, so you can probably just strap a noise diode with a suitable filter on the back of your phone or something...
Yeah, GPS signals make it inside houses just fine. It might've been a problem 20 years ago, but newer receivers are mindbogglingly sensitive.
Some time back, I was helping prep a uBlox MAX-5Q receiver for a high-altitude balloon flight. At altitude and with no other noise around, we figured we could get away without an amplified antenna, so we had a little passive helix design. But before attaching that, for giggles, I just soldered a piece of plain wire to the module's antenna pad, trimmed to what I eyeballed as probably roughly something approximating a quarter-wavelength at 1.5GHz-ish maybe.
It got a 3D fix within moments. Indoors. On a workbench under a mountain of test equipment. With a ton of RFI around. In an industrial building with 2 layers of roof. With a paperclip for an antenna.
And that was a 5th-generation receiver. We're up to the 9th generation now and they've only continued to improve.
Yes, most cellphone locations are wifi geolocation, because it takes less power. But even if you can render that moot, the GPS signal itself is plenty strong to receive indoors. And modern chipsets are tracking at least 3 and maybe 4 constellations, giving them a lot more satellite options, so there's almost always a good set overhead at favorable angles.
Interesting, my anecdotal experience is quite different in that I have had trouble getting fixes within both my home and my office with fairly fancy receivers and antennas with LNAs (u-blox zed-f9p, and m8t). At work, even right by the window is challenging. But these are high-rises in with thick walls in a big city and probably tons of multipath...
Did your receiver work at high altitudes? I guess ITAR rules have been relaxed so GNSS receivers are allowed on balloons with no problems nowadays.
Sadly the balloon never flew! Project disbanded for other reasons, after we got half the hardware built. Anyway!
One of these days I'm gonna sit down with SatGen and figure out how to make a track that rises to high altitude, then simulate it with gps-sdr-sim and do some ITAR testing. I have a HackRF with a stable enough clock, and I have the shielded test enclosures, I just don't have a good way to generate a track that's not at sea level.
As for your results... Those are some pretty fancy receivers, do I know you as a fellow Galmon contributor? There's an F9P on my windowsill as station #41, and I had an M8U on my desk last week. Each has gotten a fix just fine sitting on the desk, by the way.
In your office I suspect the glass has a low-E coating which is metallic, and effectively forms a skin over the whole building. No explanation for the house though; I see moderately slower TTFF times and sometimes poor C/no stats for certain parts of the sky, but otherwise things work just fine in my house. Is there a way to get a background noise level rating out of these receivers?
Yeah, probably my office building has some sort of shielding... I barely even get cell reception in my office, even sitting by the window.
It worked better in my apartment, but I had to basically hang the antennas off my window. I have since moved from that apartment and have not tried in my new place, although I suspect it would be worse since there's another tall building across the street. I did (and still do) live very close to an elevated train line, which noticeably produces tons of noise (as in my TV antenna cuts out...) whenever a train goes by!
Okay, so the dark side of this is that I don't want Google and Mozilla to associate my Wi-Fi access point with a GPS location, and by corrupting GPS data within my home they can think my Wi-Fi router is in the middle of the ocean.
The problem is that a neighbor that sees your WiFi access point will be feeding Google/whoever with the correct SSID/geo correlation. Your data will eventually be excluded out as noise and you won’t have prevented anything. Basically your neighbors become unwilling informants.
Okay, so flip-flip side of this is that I would like to be excluded out as noise so that they stop tracking me, and I can keep changing my access point's mac address and SSID periodically to solve the neighbor problem.
Alternatively, I could just move my fake location a few blocks down the road and it would be enough to satisfy my privacy wishes while not being too much of an outlier.
Still though, I would like to at least /try/ it rather than just sitting here and doing nothing about it.
You might be able to set your bssid to all zeros or something to fight this tracking. Not sure if this would lead to your devices no longer associating though...
I wonder if there's an "I am Spartacus" sort of BSSID that a whole ton of people around the world could use, and it wouldn't matter as long as there aren't two of us within radio range of each other. I assume 00-DE-AD-BE-EF-00 would be worth a try..
Yes, but there are idiot apps like WeChat that now ban you arbitrarily if they think you're interfering. I got banned once for running Xposed plugins on WeChat. It would be nicer if no software on the phone had any way of telling that it is being spoofed, and instead spoof the actual radio waves.
Or maybe I should just desolder the GPS chip, if I can figure out which one it is.
If you are concerned about privacy, it may not be in your best interests to install WeChat or any other app developed by companies under the jurisdiction of a State without a strong legal and enforcement framework dedicated to the protection of your rights.
I don't want to bring the State into this. Yes there are censorship issues. But Tencent does a LOT of horrible things with WeChat that are not even required by the state. I'm talking Apple-level horrible.
Also, I don't actually have an option if I want to maintain my social life.
Tencent does some horrible things with software beyond the laws of China. Apple does too -- that's why I don't use an iPhone as my normal phone. But I have to use an iPhone for certain test apps and I'd like to be able to spoof GPS for Apple and Tencent at the same time.
I'm much more concerned about these companies invading my privacy than the US or China government.
You have a point. But a full cage is probably unnecessary for some devices. Back when I worked on things like this we had a bucket. It was the 'out of coverage' test metal bucket. You had to be careful to get the whole wire harness inside the bucket or it still could sneak in there (as cell coverage is sneaky). I think someone picked it up at local Tractor Supply chain. Someone else had found a small decorative bucket that was meant for plants that just happened to fit perfectly over our smaller IoT devices. It was maybe 5 bucks of materials. Also you might be able to get away with a simple shed that is made out of tin. Havent tried it so your mileage may vary. Retrofitting a house would probably mean taking down the existing exterior or interior walls. The materials would not be that expensive. Most of your cost would goto hiring someone to do it right.
The big downside to my approach is heat dissipation and servicing.
It really depends on the wavelengths you want to suppress. Purpose built faraday cages are very tight. Socal houses with stucco siding do a pretty ok job at blocking cell phone frequencies though.
from what I understand a Faraday cage needs to be different sizes depending on what frequencies you want to block, and the only way to really get it all is to make it solid. I'm sure someone with more in depth knowledge is on here.
> One of those possibilities [of the widespread connectivity to IoT devices] is certainly connectivity that is now completely outside of the control of the "owner" of these devices... By putting a cellular modem and SIM directly in a device... it will be able to report home whether the "owner" wants it to or not. The vendor will retain control and will be able to, for example, disable the device at will.
It has transcended corporations and is now permeating all of society. Our devices are or will be managed by corporations and governments. As users of these devices, this management naturally extends to our entire lives. I hope at some point it becomes too oppressive for people to tolerate... Only way to see any real change.
I used to be really into protecting my privacy online. These days I’ve mostly just accepted there’s pretty much nothing I can do short of disconnecting entirely. I’m not even sure why a smart faucet would be appealing to any consumer.
I feel like I’ve just accepted that we lost. I don’t see how we’ll ever get rid of mass surveillance. If we couldn’t get rid of the patriot act after Snowden’s whistleblowing, and we can get consumer privacy/protection now I’m not sure how we’ll ever get it. Maybe I’m just burnt out and cynical, but I don’t see why the government or corporations have any incentive to let people do anything without them knowing about it.
I have reasonable privacy online. None of my devices connect to google, except if I explicitly do so, which I do from time to time for a reason or other. None of my devices are even capable of connecting to Facebook owned domains, I have them DNS blocked.
JS off by default for all sites, no social media (except this site and one more that I run myself). I don't own a TV or any smart appliance whatsoever. No google assistant, siri, Alexa. None of that.
I buy things on Amazon. They know where I live and what I buy from them. They cannot show me ads because I let nobody show me ads.
All in all some people probably get some info about me, but the info collected on me is probably along the lines of what they were capable of getting in 2005. And good luck stitching it all together.
You can do a lot short of disconnecting. But you have to disconnect from the strip mall "internet". You can't wait on laws, because you're right, they have no incentive. You're the only one that does, so you have to do something about it, in your own life, for yourself.
You say reasonable, but that's more than 95% of what "privacy advocates" do and I'd say that's a serious level of privacy. I do most of the things you do as well, so I'm not calling you a radical, but that's not really reasonable; that's way more than most people, even "privacy conscious" ones.
Yeah, I know, but once you have it set up it isn't any more work. And it is a serious level of privacy (and it isn't the entire extent of my setup either) but if some alphabet soup agency wanted to find me they probably could. It's really just to protect me from data collectors and ad agencies and stuff online.
When a lot of people say "it is just too hard" what they mean to say is "I want to use services that track me." For most people, only turning on JS for web apps and not using malware as a service is all it really takes.
>None of my devices are even capable of connecting to Facebook owned domains, I have them DNS blocked.
Can't malicious application work around your DNS block? Is there a way to be 100% sure say all Facebook/Google is blocked? I am not a networking guy so maybe the future is to whitelist IPs/domains for each device and application.
I'm not sure about this actually. I would assume that an application could connect to a DNS server directly and request an IP for a specific domain and then navigate directly. I don't believe I have any applications on any devices that do that, but it is possible.
> I’m not even sure why a smart faucet would be appealing to any consumer
Very quickly off the top of my head I could imagine:
- measuring out the appropriate volume for the teapot and delivering at the ideal brewing temperature for the particular tea
- knowing that one family member likes drinking water ice-cold while another prefers near-room-temperature
- recognising that it's about to pour onto hands and reducing the temperature to below scalding
- choosing from various sources (tap, filtered, recycled storm-water) depending on use-case, to optimise supply costs, filtration costs, environmental impact etc.
It's annoying (from a privacy and security perspective) how 'smart'-ening even the most innocuous things can be quite appealing to the end-user, and how nasty (again, from a privacy and security perspective) the implementations that make it to market end up being.
It doesn't need to be that way though. Embedded software powered devices have been around for decades, and much like video-games of old nobody needed to beam updates to them throughout the life of the product, and they didn't stop working the moment the company went out of business.
All of those tasks could be completed with robust and simple software, rather than ridiculous stacks of constantly updating libraries connected to the internet.
Exactly! We have, as an industry, collectively forgotten that computing power can be had without connecting to the Internet. Nobody’s objecting to smart gadgets—we are objecting to gadgets that needlessly rely on Internet to work, serve unwanted ads to us, and surreptitiously send god knows what data back to the manufacturer.
>we are objecting to gadgets that needlessly rely on Internet to work, serve unwanted ads to us, and surreptitiously send god knows what data back to the manufacturer.
Don't forget "gadgets that are beholden to the manufacturer allowing them to keep functioning."
>It's annoying (from a privacy and security perspective) how 'smart'-ening even the most innocuous things can be quite appealing to the end-user, and how nasty (again, from a privacy and security perspective) the implementations that make it to market end up being.
I agree. The benefits of "smart" devices could be a great boon to all of us, far beyond the examples you gave.
In fact, most IOT devices would be most welcome in my home if, and only if, they only pushed data to a local source directly under my control.
At that point, as long as I can manage the flow of data, I would be perfectly happy with a voice assistant (which connected to the Internet only to service specific requests and didn't pass my voice data to "the cloud") or an entertainment device which would connect to the service(s) of my choice and retrieve/stream voice/video/music when I direct it to do so.
Video door entry systems, room-by-room climate/lighting control, automated oven pre-heating and a raft of other conveniences would be fabulous too.
The problem isn't the technology, but rather how it's implemented. And these ideas aren't anything new either. Heinlein, The Jetsons and many, many other sources predicted home automation like this decades ago.
The real barriers to such locally managed systems is widespread adoption of protocols and software to locally manage this stuff.
But it's a chicken and egg problem. Why would home owners/builders/renovators include such systems when the IoT devices all phone home and specifically forbid reverse engineering and re-purposing?
And why would device manufacturers implement such open protocols and integration with locally controlled/managed systems when there's both no market for it, and they can increase revenues by selling all that tasty, tasty data?
There's a multi-billion dollar industry for locally controlled/managed home automation/IoT systems that could be created and cultivated, but the current barriers to entry are pretty high and (given that general-purpose computing devices for the home are on the decline) getting higher.
I'd be happy just to have a faucet where a reasonable human can get water that comes out at a temperature other than "freezing cold" and "scalding hot".
I'd be happy with our hands-free faucet in the kitchen being able to adjust the temperature without going under the sink to twist a fiddly knob where the water is connected.
I haven't given up, because the fight still pays off. I just don't treat it as an all-or-nothing struggle.
Privacy is a side-effect of addressing other concerns. I use uBlock because the internet sucks without it. I delete old accounts to avoid data breeches. I avoid IoT because it's finicky and has a shorter lifespan. I compartmentalise my online life to keep the internet hate machine at bay. I don't use Facebook or LinkedIn because I don't enjoy it. I don't give my contact information because I don't want to be contacted.
All those privacy-oriented actions have other tangible benefits.
I see privacy like eating fruit and getting exercise. It's good hygiene, and even a half-assed effort is better than nothing.
I am by no means a luddite, and hope to enjoy the fruits of civilization and society for as long as it will let me. But I have started picking up a bunch of skills in order to maintain and build anew, devices and tools that will no doubt become unnecessarily bloated in the future.
I already have some rudimentary electronics skill, so it's mostly been metalworking, such as welding and machining. I have a 3D printer as well, I'm not against PLA for replacement plastic parts and not against using technology I have full control over as a means to my ends.
Don't need to buy a smart faucet if I can build my own very ordinary faucet.
5G will not help, in fact the reverse. It gives low-cost wifi-like connectivity/relay ability to iot devices, so they can gather data without pesky "onboarding friction"
I think X10 should really push their products with the privacy preservation agenda - https://www.x10.com
Connected remote controllable devices are useful, but letting them access the net is intolerable. X10 is a decent compromise as long as they promise not to internet their devices.
The radios will need some kind of receiver in order to send (handshaking with the cell network and the data server). You could probably expose it to very high EMF on the frequency in question, which can often permanently damage radio receivers. The might be the easiest way, no device opening required.
Disclaimer: Poster is not responsible for any damage caused by this approach. Do not violate FCC laws. Always use a Faraday cage for experimental transmissions.
A second (or fraction of a second, depending on how long it takes for the magnetron to get up to full power) in a microwave works wonders on radios that can't be disabled or removed.
You don't want to give it any longer than that though because it might cause physical evidence of damage (arcing on PCBs, ICs with holes in them, etc.).
Yes, but that may not matter if the total duration is kept very low.
Many IoT-type radios use the same 2.4Ghz band as domestic microwaves and will be destroyed in a fraction of a second as the radio's AFE (analogue front end) is hit by many many orders of magnitude more energy than they're designed to tolerate.
I would wager that many devices that don't have other significant "energy-catching" features (antennas, radios, coils for NFC, etc.) would work just fine after experiencing a short stint in a microwave.
I did actually test this once on a very old 3G modem/radio interface and I found that every part of the interface seemed to function just fine, except that it could no longer receive any radio signals (and may have been unable to transmit but I couldn't confirm this with a spectrum analyser). The modem otherwise operated just fine and would talk to the SIM, operate all its LEDs and even seemed to pass an internal self-test feature that it had, with the obvious exception that it could no longer find any radio towers.
I obviously can't guarantee that your stuff won't blow up, so don't come blaming me when your device ends up being trashed by microwave energy going through unintended parts.
TV are a perfect example as to way I believe the free market has failed. Normally you’d expect one or two TV makers to have noticed a growing concern regarding smart-tvs and started to cater to that part of the market.
I understand that those of us who would pay a premium for a dumb TV are a minority, but it seems like there’s enough of us to justify at least a few models.
The assumption that I would want to control everything from my phone is getting out of hand.
Because you literally cannot buy those TV here. I didn't check all of them, but the Samsung one seemed like a good candidate, it's not for sale in Denmark apparently. Maybe you could special order it.
But you're right, apparently the TV makers aren't the issue, the stores are.
I love that "non-smart-tv" is a category on that Romanian site.
The free market just does not work. There is a reason I had a "free software" revelation long ago when I realized that every time there is a single metric that does not appear in traditional consumer benchmarks most consumer devices will outright fail at that metric, even if would only take a couple software-developer hours to fix it.
E.g. time to switch from one HDMI source to the next one. I have a projector where that clocks at an insane 15 seconds. Every single interruption of the HDMI signal results in at least 15 seconds of delay before the projector can show anything other than a black screen. It's just great when you are trying to setup the laptop for a presentation. The number of times I have cursed the entiry family of the designer of that projector's firmware, only to realize most commercial projectors are like that...
It's one of those cases where government intervention really would be to the benefit of everyone. If data collection and advertising through TVs or set-top devices was made illegal (or I guess opt-in) then suddenly the pressure on panel manufacturers would be off because they know that their competition can't pad their margins with it either.
The parent poster was explicitly mentioning those willing to pay a premium. If people aren't willing to pay a premium for a niche product, that's explicitly telling the market that this niche shouldn't exist as a separate niche and the cheaper mass-market solution will do just fine.
Yeah, I looked at those last time I replaced my TV. You also need to be able to locate a reseller who will sell to private individuals, which can be difficult in some location.
Now play with the thought that your Samsung TV sees no internet, but notices your Samsung phone over BLE. A couple of commands later your TV uses your phone as an entry point to the internet.
If you don't mind voiding the warranty, open up the TV and find the WLAN and/or cellular modem, and snip off the antenna/break the PCB trace used as an antenna. In some cases it's probably attached with a tiny coax connector that you can disconnect.
No antenna, no signal. Just make sure to get a TV that doesn't need online activation to function.
I'm just waiting for them to start routing the remote control signals over the same modems. Want complete privacy? Congrats you can't use the remote either!
ive heard numerous times on here about tv's searching for nearby open networks and using them to upload, so a long as your neighbors practice good security you might be ok
Suppose I want to design an IoT device with security in mind. How would I best go about doing that? I've been looking for a good source for best practices, but most of what I've seen so far is hand-wavy or Amazon-centric.
Step 1: Decide whether you actually need network connectivity for the main use case of whatever you are building. The answer will usually be no.
Step 2: If the answer to step 1 was YES, then now decide if you need Internet access for the device’s main use case. The answer will almost always be no.
Step 3: If the answer so both of the above was YES, finally decide if your device’s main use case requires you to build a server-side service, too.
If the answer is NO, plan on investing a lot in security professionals. If the answer is YES (I’d be shocked), plan on spending an enormous amount on security professionals. Then listen to those professionals.
AWS/GCP/Twilio/etc IoT or almost any other managed IoT service is going to be good for securing devices by only making outbound connections instead of accepting inbound ones. This reduces the attack surface to 'taking over an AWS account', ie. the Ubiquiti hack, which is better than regular IoT devices which have random UPnP-broadcasted open ports and, if they don't have reliable automatic updates, means vulnerability become the next target of a 0.0.0.0/0 network scan.
Generally it involves some answer that doesn't wait till the device and backend are nearly complete. Security shouldn't be the last step of your equation.
Snark aside, there are lots of white papers on x509 provision of devices, including IoT devices. Go read them.
On the plus side everyone who comes across this subthread will have it in mind the next time a friend talks about this great IoT idea they have. Better culture starts at the bottom with one person sharing a thought with another.
You've gone off on several people now who got the exact same impression rather than accept maybe you're not a flawless communicator. You can't expect more charitable reads from others if you're not willing to be the first to give others the benefit of the doubt. This lashing out is definitely not going to convince people you thought about security in advance.
You broke the HN guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. The rules apply regardless of whether other users are breaking them, how bad their comments are, or how bad you feel they are. We've also had to ask you not to break the site guidelines before.
I really don't appreciate this response. Perhaps I've been overly brief about the background of the product's development, but a lot of effort has been put into security. I've read lots of documents about x509 provisioning. I am curious what people here are doing. Telling me to go read white papers is garbage response.
As much as I appreciate the cynicism of your comment, it doesn't really answer OP's question which started off with:
> Suppose I want to design an internet-of-things device with security in mind […]
Meanwhile, half of your answer is spent discussing whether or not OP might need internet access, when in reality this is already a given. In short, you are talking about general "smart devices" but smart devices ⊋ IoT devices.
Yea, that was the point, layered under a little snark. Time saved up front by relaxing the requirements so that you don't need a backend service or Internet means you don't even have to think about x509 provisioning.
Frankly, this thread would have been better off without your response. I don't need my use case second guessed because you have an ax to grind with other irresponsible IoT products.
Alternatively, you could take my question at face value. Let's assume I'm an engineer who isn't a complete imbecile who has given the issue some thought already.
I have also been looking for "custom firmwares" or "roms" for TVs. Sadly to no fruitful success.
As I understand it. Nobody bothers since there are som many different versions of TVs ( even same model different region) that hacking and developing new os would just never catch up. So instead people opt out of smart TVs and instead buy "digital signage screens" basically a dum TV....
TVs are very similar to Android phones (in fact some of them do run Android) and so have the same challenges when it comes to creating and maintaining alternative firmware.
So, it would seem that we have an opportunity for a niche appliance maker: the "dumb appliance" market. I think the issue is that most of the purchases are determined by price and features (that I want), rather than an absence of features I don't want. But you could probably build a decent amount of brand loyalty with a "dumb appliance" selling point.
However, because you would have no data to sell, you would have to actually sell the item itself for a price that would be sufficient to make a profit.
A decent-quality MP3 is 96 kbps; that means that it would take a little over 30 terabytes to store an entire lifetime’s worth of audio, or under 4 terabytes to store a decade’s worth (assuming I got the math right). At today’s prices that’s less than $500 to store a lifetime’s worth of audio, less than $50 to store a decade’s.
Does anyone doubt that an unethical company could make well over $5/year from storing and analysing every second of audio spoken within earshot of its devices?
DRM in a vehicle is not good for the owner on so many levels.
The whole concept of owning a car outright and being allowed and able to maintain it if you choose has already been effectively ended by complexity, lack of shop manuals and legal 'don't remove the plastic engine cover or you'll void the warranty' restrictions was the first wave.
Now we have cars transmitting gigabytes of information back and forth to the vendor and who knows who.
IMO we should have consumer legislation protecting owners from this razor and blades model the vendors are trying to force through: you buy the car then we sell you endless 'features' and upgrades which will ultimately render the car inoperable unless you.
Cars used to be cheap and repairable. Now they are expensive, have a short lifecycle and are becoming infested with endless digital do dads
$£ upgrade.
Thanks for sharing. Because I'm so engrossed in the IoT world I never really thought of the ability to opt out of connected devices. Especially if devices use cellular (hard to opt out) instead of Wifi (Easier to opt out).
I disagree with the author because I think there are legitimate reasons for devices to connect to networks. For example Tesla cars can get better over time. TVs can do updates to fix bugs and new functionality.
But the down side is the opportunity of spying and monitoring the user.
For example what happens if your Washing Machine stopped working because a bad manufacturer decided to stop it over cellular?
Thank you. We need more messages like yours, short and sweet. "We need laws for $problem" is something that can succeed in a democracy.
Beating the bush around one's pet peeves or detailing what one deems an optimal policy is fine, except it often waters down that basic message for 99% readers, when only 1% will be somehow informed/enlightened.
Huh. Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance? Would that be illegal? Would anyone care? :)
There was a case in the news a few years or so ago where someone did that with the SIM that was in their electric meter, which was used once a day by the electric company to send a report of cumulative usage.
What they did not count on was that many cellular carriers have data plans specifically for devices like that electric meter that just need to send a very small amount of data every hour or day or so.
Those plans have a very small monthly fixed fee, a small data allowance, and astronomical overage fees. Typical data allowances for the cheapest plans are maybe 50 KB, which is plenty for sending "<meter-id> <timestamp> <cumulative kWh> <checksum>" once a day.
The person used the SIM for their calls and data, including downloading a bunch of movies. They ended up incurring around $150k overage charges.
The electric company cared very much, and the person ended up with a short jail sentence.
There's an old (10 years?) case about smart traffic lights that included SIM cards for connectivity - which were taken out of the traffic lights and abused. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12135841
Another case (for which I don't have a link) some years ago was that ornithologists were doing tracking of large migratory birds using ankle bracelets w. embedded radios - until people "underneath" the birds found out that they contain a SIM provisioned for international roaming, which resulted in birds with such bracelets being shot down to obtain these SIMs as they could be used to extract and sell a few thousand dollars in comms services to locals.
> Would it be possible for someone to hijack the SIM card in such a device
Depends if it's using a physical SIM card or an eSIM module like Apple does that's entirely provisioned from the device's userland.
> and use it to get free calls all over the world, including long-distance?
Depends on the plan assigned by the vendor / phone company. If it's a data only plan, then no.
> Would that be illegal? Would anyone care? :)
Depends on which jurisdiction you are and what you're doing. A couple of dollars worth of charges on a company that sells millions of "smart" devices? Probably won't even get flagged. A couple hundred dollars for calling a phone sex line or someone on a satellite phone however? That will cause someone to have a look.
Having worked as a code developing MBA consultant in the IoT space, I have banned any IoT and any WIFI requiring devices in my home. The security practices in IoT are simply nonexistent and often completely absent. I use ethernet at home, and have no issues at all with a complete lack of any "smart (snitch) devices". Horror of horrors, I have to walk up to a screen, operate the mouse, physically select things and make them go. My voice is so jealous.
I'd like to do this, but currently in a rental and have to use WiFi. I do use an Android smart TV and have a security camera outside. But both those devices are connected to a separate WiFi/router on a separate subnet. Hopefully my PC is safe from Android/IoT if they get hacked. Of course, anything can happen on the PC too! But at least I can monitor it better.
Once the kids get older, all that goes out the window. They'll become the security hole. Haha.
One semi-secret feature of IoT is that wooden walls are almost transparent to the microwave / wifi radiation, so it can be used to effectively see thru walls.
This suggests an entire new industry, Faradayed Internet of Things Shells (FIoTS): for any device, get your bespoke faraday shell casing from a wide array of third-party vendors…
These are already a thing for WLAN-routers for the electrosmog people. Which is of course the one place where they don't make sense, but would probably work for similarly-sized appliances.
I recently purchased a new wireless router and ran into this same issue. It is now surprisingly difficult to find a consumer-grade wifi router that doesn't phone home. And disconnecting your router from the internet isn't really an option...
That's not really consumer grade, though. Not something your average mom and dad can go buy at Best Buy and have working without external assistance.
Flashed TP-Link routers, hostapd on a NUC-style PC, Mikrotik, even Ubiquiti Unifi are what I would consider way beyond general consumer level. The userfriendliness just isn't there.
besides the fact that that requires a lot of technical expertise and voids the warrantee, from my experience hardware that is even compatible with open source firmware like openwrt is much harder to find and can be more expensive.
The GDPR is not being enforced seriously. There are plenty of violations already out there (including from big companies such as Google or Facebook) and nothing serious is being done about it.
However, sometimes it becomes unavoidable. After a recent diagnosis with sleep apnea, I got a cpap machine, which has a cellular network connection in it, which connects to a centralized service where the sleep technicians can tune the device to deliver the right pressure for my sleeping patterns. What it also did was allow my insurance company to know how much I was using the device, in order to decide whether it was going to pay for it or not.
So, I really don't see how I could have avoided this IOT device and received treatment.
On the other hand, no hacker is going to be able to compromise my network via this device, so maybe this truly is a better path forward for IOT devices?