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Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

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Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#111

Post by kube-system »

jdiff wrote: post #21
patrickmcnamara wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperbole.

It's really not. It was a fun toy but had very little utility. It could generate plausible looking text that collapsed immediately upon any amount of inspection or even just attention. Code generation wasn't even a twinkle in Altman's eye scanning orbs at that point.

I think you misunderstand the comment you replied to. They are saying the above comment was a rhetorical exaggeration of GPT-2's capabilities as a commentary on how low quality Samsung TV software is. They don't actually think GPT-2 was very capable. It is a figure of speech, not a literal statement.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#114

Post by layer8 »

qingcharles wrote: post #100
layer8 wrote: post #79

It’s important to note that Codex was given access to the source code. In another comment thread that is currently on the front page ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456 ), the opinion is repeatedly voiced that being closed source doesn’t provide a material benefit in defending against vulnerabilities being discovered and exploited using AI. So it would be interesting to see how Codex would fare here witho…

There are two levels below having the source. One is having the binary of the firmware, which could be decompiled by the AI and understood. And then the worst-case is what I'm dealing with currently, which is where there is no access to the firmware binary and the firmware is stored on the PCB in such a way to prevent sticking a chip clip on it and forcibly extracting it, so you're totally blind. (Just as you would b…

Agreed. The context of the thread I linked was about SaaS, where you don’t have the binary.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#115

Post by saintfire »

croes wrote: post #18
varispeed wrote: post #11

Codex exploited or you exploited? It's like saying a hammer drove a nail, without acknowledging the hand and the force it exerted and the human brain behind it.

If I just point to the wall and say "nail" then I would day the hammer drive the nail

You didn't, you figured out where the nail needs to go, got the nail and then swung the hammer until the nail was driven.

This is really just closer to a drill in that it automated the grunt work with full guidance.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#116

Post by stronglikedan »

alfanick wrote: post #26

I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with C…

It's a shame that you can't share how you did that without running afoul of DMCA Section 1201 and risking years in federal prison.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#117

Post by bedstefar »

stronglikedan wrote: post #116
alfanick wrote: post #26

I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with C…

It's a shame that you can't share how you did that without running afoul of DMCA Section 1201 and risking years in federal prison.

... in exactly one of this planet's countries

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#118

Post by CMay »

Leomuck wrote: post #64
Lambdanaut wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?

Well what kind of meaning do you find in brute force? I'm not saying it's not effective. I just critisize the news that make it look like AI is the a revolutionary advance in security. It is not. It makes skills available to many more people which is cool, but it is based off of training - training on things people did. It doesn't magically find a new combination of factors that lead to a security issue, it tries thi…

I'm not the person who responded to you, but I think of a brute force attack as essentially translatable into brute (dumb) force (effort). No thinking, no decision making, but the process is known. Here is a pile of stones, move that pile of stones from here to over there. In the case of most brute force, you think of it like cracking passwords. You have an algorithm or you have a giant pile of passwords. Move those passwords over to try them on this hash. The processor is doing the heavy lifting on the simple task.

Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details.

In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#119

Post by tredre3 »

joenot443 wrote: post #95

> [1] Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV, Does anyone know what the author meant by this? Are they talking about a web browser run on the TV?

Yes they are. Historically browsers have been vectors to gain control of locked down devices. It's been very useful for game consoles, amongst others: PSP, Vita, Switch, Wii, and DS all had browser exploits that bootstrapped more permanent and system-wide exploits to run homebrew.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#120

Post by Confiks »

SyneRyder wrote: post #105
tracker1 wrote: post #103

If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.

Pretty much the same with my newly acquired LG Smart TV. I thought I might like webOS, since it's technically a descendent of palmOS, but oh no. No no no. I've opted just to not plug it in to the network and not provide a WiFi password.

I recently bought a second hand eight year old 4K LG TV. Pretty cheap too. All models running webOS 3.x and 4.x are trivially rootable as LG never provided an update against DejaVul [1]. There's a handy website to check which models are rootable [2]. You can write directly to the (old!) Wayland socket; haven't tried a libwayland yet that is compatible.

IIRC the last public exploit for all LG TVs for webOS > 5 was in the beginning of 2025 (so pretty recent), but as most sellers on the second hand market have auto-updates turned on, there's no way to know which TVs are vulnerable.

It should be doable to strip down much of webOS with root access. It's nice that webOS in general is very well documented and much is implemented around the Luna service bus. LG offers a developer mode for non-rooted TVs, and there's an active homebrew community because of it. It's a pity that you can't modify the boot partitions, as the firmware verifies their integrity. It would be nice to have an exploit for that.

[1] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot

[2] https://cani.rootmy.tv

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