Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the answer is to subvert the global certificate infrastructure that protects web traffic? No, it isn’t. Your IoT device has no security at all if a non-technical user is setting it up or if it doesn’t have a way of accepting a user configured certificate, and you shouldn’t pretend otherwise by dressing it up in bad certificates and worthless encrypted tunnels. Just use HTTP.
I mean if they’re worthless tunnels then so is every SSH tunnel. Should we just go back to telnet?
The argument here is that we should enable lots of shitty IoT devices to masquerade as being secure, and inure browser users to click ‘yes’ to accepting a broken certificate.
If it’s on a managed network, IT can set up a certificate and push that out to client machines. If it’s on your home network you can do that (unless your IoT device can’t take a user configured client cert, in which case it’s rubbish anyways), and if you can’t then you might as well use HTTP.