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Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

electronupdate.blogspot.com

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Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#121

Post by mhaymo »

dvdkhlng wrote: post #108
Daho0n wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK a reboot would trigger a reset from mic off to mic on. If true that is a very poor choice for a privacy switch.

Also a minor hardware re-design may change mic switch behaviour in the future without that change being noticeable to the buyer. You'd really need regular tear-downs of a sufficient sample-size of devices to make sure that you can actually trust newly bought devices with sufficiently high confidence.

It depends how paranoid you are. If you believe your audio is so valuable that Amazon would create a separate hardware model for you and those like you, and would succeed in keeping that a secret, then yeah you still shouldn't buy an Echo. You will also not want any other always-on devices with microphones and network connections, like a phone or laptop. 99.9% people are not in this category.

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#122

Post by kylegordon »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #110
jeffrallen wrote: post #86

The fact that the mike defaults to on after power on is completely understandable from a user interface perspective, but from a security perspective it makes the mute switch useless. Why? Because any attacker that has penetrated far enough to be able to control the SOC in order to snoop can also trigger a SOC reset in order to make sure that the mike is enabled before they start snooping. A physical switch would have…

> The fact that the mike defaults to on after power on is completely understandable from a user interface perspective A compromise would be to play a message after turning the device on, requiring user to take action and unmute it or leave muted. This shouldn't be a problem in most scenarios as Echo is meant to be powered once and run for a long time, so it would be just a minor inconvenience.

I'm curious as to what the state would be after a firmware upgrade?

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#123

Post by nisa »

PeterStuer wrote: post #96
maigret wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't buy one.

With Alexa and it's ilk being integrated in ever more home electronic devices, not buying one is becoming increasingly impossible.

    sed -i 's/impossible/inconvenient/g'
The power of convenience is probably also the reason to place a megacorp microphone in your home in the first place.

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#124

Post by e12e »

pansa2 wrote: post #81
jessriedel wrote: post #20

Conclusion: > But, basically if one presses the switch it causes the flip-flops to change state and to then either add or remove power from the microphones. > The 'mute' button appears to be very real and functional. When the button glows 'red' the power is removed from the microphones.

I sometimes write articles describing investigations similar to this one. Do you think this article’s structure is appropriate? Or would it be better to reduce the need for comments like this one by putting the conclusion much earlier in the piece? I understand not putting the conclusion in the title, but perhaps in the first paragraph, in the spirit of BLUF [0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

> I understand not putting the conclusion in the title

Why?

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#125

Post by KraftKacke »

HourglassFR wrote: post #79

Yes that is the technical conclusion. But maybe the most important thing is that we have to do an actual teardown of the product in order to have some confidence that Amazon is not lying on it's Echo capabilities. To be clear, I am not saying we should trust Amazon & Co, I'm saying that if that's the level of trust we have with home assistance devices, why even bother with the stuff ?

To me it's unfathomable to have such a device around. I even feel uncomfortable with my neighbor having one (which I _hear him talking to).

I assume it's like reading the side effects of medication and think they are other people's problems somehow. How do people trade core privacy for setting the alarm or getting the weather report by voice command. I don't respect them. Same with off the shelf IP cameras in one's bedroom. Hello?

Air gapped speech recognition and FOSS, or this should never, ever become a thing.

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#126

Post by richrichardsson »

e12e wrote: post #124
pansa2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes write articles describing investigations similar to this one. Do you think this article’s structure is appropriate? Or would it be better to reduce the need for comments like this one by putting the conclusion much earlier in the piece? I understand not putting the conclusion in the title, but perhaps in the first paragraph, in the spirit of BLUF [0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

> I understand not putting the conclusion in the title Why?

I would hazard a guess that fewer people would read the article if the headline was, "Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute, real or fake? It's real."

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#127

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

appleflaxen wrote: post #98
chaboud wrote: post #15

Disclosure: I'm an Amazon Devices PE, but not on Alexa devices. Jeff (and others) have spoken publicly about this in the past, and this teardown is correct. The hardware is designed such that, if the privacy LED is on, the microphone is unpowered. In order to compromise that, one would need to physically alter/damage the hardware.

Your statement really isn't any different than saying "Amazon says the mute button is real". Which we already knew. The problem is that many people don't trust the good faith of the company you work for, and by extension they won't trust you either.

Many people trust this "word of mouth" way of telling stories, but for those who know rhetorics this pattern should raise a warning. (it is not my intention to accuse, just doing some rhetoric deconstruction) The "so the teardown is correct" part is backwards. Calling the billionaire ceo by his first name tries to create an aura of personal knowledge. At the core it is an argumentum ab auctoritate. Honestly this is worse than "amazon said so" because it is veiled.

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#128

Post by tomxor »

pansa2 wrote: post #107
Birkalo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that BLUF is definitely the better way of writing most informational pieces, particularly articles such as this. It's a similar concept to the 'Topic Sentence' which would be used to sum up the ideas of the following paragraph. The only reason I could see for actively choosing not to use BLUF - would be to force users to read more of your article for the sake of it, which seems (to me) like a 'cheap' tactic.

Do you think presenting the conclusion up-front could detract from the “story-telling” of the piece? By walking the reader through the investigation and its findings in chronological order, perhaps the article aims to make the reader feel like they are performing the investigation themselves?

Agreed. Although being upfront to some degree is useful there is a balance, some things are better revealed in context to fully appreciate. If the conclusion is less binary or singular something can be sacrificed without ruining everything, but in this case I can't see a way to not destroy the story telling... I'm pretty sure I preferred reading this without BLUF.

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#129

Post by mabbo »

tobr wrote: post #84
chaboud wrote: post #15

Disclosure: I'm an Amazon Devices PE, but not on Alexa devices. Jeff (and others) have spoken publicly about this in the past, and this teardown is correct. The hardware is designed such that, if the privacy LED is on, the microphone is unpowered. In order to compromise that, one would need to physically alter/damage the hardware.

Which “Jeff” are you referring to here, and if it’s Bezos, why are you using his first name as if we all hang out with him on a regular basis?

Strangely enough, it is totally normal at Amazon to simply call Jeff Bezos "Jeff".

He even has the jeff@ email address.

Re: Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional

#130

Post by sneak »

chaboud wrote: post #15

Disclosure: I'm an Amazon Devices PE, but not on Alexa devices. Jeff (and others) have spoken publicly about this in the past, and this teardown is correct. The hardware is designed such that, if the privacy LED is on, the microphone is unpowered. In order to compromise that, one would need to physically alter/damage the hardware.

> The SOC (system on chip) controller seems to be connected to the flip flop resets, which makes sense as the product powers on with the microphone enabled as default....

To compromise it, one just needs control of the SOC (which Amazon has) to turn the light off and the mics back on.

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