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My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

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Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#21

Post by Almondsetat »

buildbot wrote: post #12
rikafurude21 wrote: post #9

Its still crazy to me that everyone has a pocket AI-hacker ready to inspect firmware and modify their devices now. You just put the agent on it and it gives you access in minutes. You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year, or at the very least extremely patient for long hours.

This 1000% - I’ve used AI to enable SSH in one Phase One digital back I own, and to reverse engineer and patch the firmware on another to make the back think it’s a different back - Credo 50 to IQ250! The internals are literally the Sam.

I'm sorry, are you trusting an LLM to touch a camera that costs like a new car?

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#23

Post by cwillu »

realo wrote: post #8

I understand the hacker rationale to have fun owning the device, and i would like it to stay that way. But... please do not forget that the CRA will put a heavy blanket on that fire.

TLA syndrome strikes again, I have no idea what CRA refers to here.

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#24

Post by throwaway89201 »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #9

Its still crazy to me that everyone has a pocket AI-hacker ready to inspect firmware and modify their devices now. You just put the agent on it and it gives you access in minutes. You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year, or at the very least extremely patient for long hours.

> You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year

This isn't true at all. Yes, LLMs have made it dramatically easier to analyse, debug and circumvent. Both for people who didn't have the skill to do this, and for people who know how to but just cannot be bothered because it's often a grind. This specific device turned out to be barely protected against anything. No encrypted firmware, no signature checking, and built-in SSH access. This would be extremely doable for any medium skilled person without an LLM with good motivation and effort.

You're referring to George Hotz, which is known for releasing the first PS3 hypervisor exploit. The PS3 was / is fully secured against attackers, of which the mere existence of a hypervisor layer is proof of. Producing an exploit required voltage glitching on physical hardware using an FPGA [1]. Perhaps an LLM can assist with mounting such an attack, but as there's no complete feedback loop, it still would require a lot of human effort.

[1] https://rdist.root.org/2010/01/27/how-the-ps3-hypervisor-was...

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#25

Post by throwaway89201 »

cwillu wrote: post #23
realo wrote: post #8

I understand the hacker rationale to have fun owning the device, and i would like it to stay that way. But... please do not forget that the CRA will put a heavy blanket on that fire.

TLA syndrome strikes again, I have no idea what CRA refers to here.

Cyber Resilience Act [1], which is well-intentioned, and doesn't outright forbid user access to firmware, but most vendors will take the easy road and outright block user-modifiable software (if they didn't already), so that their completely closed source, obfuscated and vulnerable version is the only version allowed on their devices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Resilience_Act

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#26

Post by tombert »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #2

Having the firmware image just be a boring old tarball + hash sounds super nice. I wish more devices were this open, and I hope Rode won't see this and decide to lock the firmware upgrades down.

I had to upgrade the firmware in my HP printer a couple years ago.

It’s a printer that I think was released in ~2009 (I am not able to check right now), and in order to upgrade the RAM to 256MB I needed to do a firmware update.

I dreaded this, but then I found out that all you do to update the firmware was FTP a tarball to the printer over the network. I dropped it in with FileZilla, it spent a few minutes whirring, and my firmware was updated.

Then I got mad that firmware updates are ever more complicated than that. Let me FTP or SCP or SFTP a blob there, do a checksum or something for security reasons, and then do nothing else.

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#27

Post by Thaxll »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #9

Its still crazy to me that everyone has a pocket AI-hacker ready to inspect firmware and modify their devices now. You just put the agent on it and it gives you access in minutes. You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year, or at the very least extremely patient for long hours.

LLM are not capable of doing that for most things. Having an open ssh device does not require any special "skill".

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#28

Post by dpark »

throwaway89201 wrote: post #24
rikafurude21 wrote: post #9

Its still crazy to me that everyone has a pocket AI-hacker ready to inspect firmware and modify their devices now. You just put the agent on it and it gives you access in minutes. You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year, or at the very least extremely patient for long hours.

> You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year This isn't true at all. Yes, LLMs have made it dramatically easier to analyse, debug and circumvent. Both for people who didn't have the skill to do this, and for people who know how to but just cannot be bothered because it's often a grind. This specific device turned out to be barely protected against anything. No en…

> fully secured against attackers, of which the mere existence of a hypervisor layer is proof of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine_escape

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#29

Post by mswphd »

throwaway89201 wrote: post #24
rikafurude21 wrote: post #9

Its still crazy to me that everyone has a pocket AI-hacker ready to inspect firmware and modify their devices now. You just put the agent on it and it gives you access in minutes. You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year, or at the very least extremely patient for long hours.

> You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year This isn't true at all. Yes, LLMs have made it dramatically easier to analyse, debug and circumvent. Both for people who didn't have the skill to do this, and for people who know how to but just cannot be bothered because it's often a grind. This specific device turned out to be barely protected against anything. No en…

didn't PS3 have a hardcoded nonce for their ECDSA impl that allowed full key recovery? I would agree that I doubt LLMs let people mount side-channel attacks easily on consumer electronics though.

Re: My audio interface has SSH enabled by default

#30

Post by magenta4 »

buildbot wrote: post #12
rikafurude21 wrote: post #9

Its still crazy to me that everyone has a pocket AI-hacker ready to inspect firmware and modify their devices now. You just put the agent on it and it gives you access in minutes. You would have to be a Hotz tier hacker if you wanted to do anything close to this only last year, or at the very least extremely patient for long hours.

This 1000% - I’ve used AI to enable SSH in one Phase One digital back I own, and to reverse engineer and patch the firmware on another to make the back think it’s a different back - Credo 50 to IQ250! The internals are literally the Sam.

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