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All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

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Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#321

Post by Raphmedia »

legitster wrote: post #6

They let their certificate expire, essentially bricking all of their devices. And now the app running it won't start, so they can't push an update. Just recently picked up a Rift. I love the hardware and their exclusives are top notch, but this confirms my suspicions that their backend is super goofy. They sell Rifts at Best Buy and want to pretend that it's a consumer-ready product, but here's why I am recommending…

> - Non-existant repair or service out of Warranty.

That.

My Rift is scratched since first use (I swear it came scratched) and I've never been able to have them acknowledge that the device can be scratched into a blurry mess. "Oh, that's only regular use wear and tear" ...

Lens cannot be replaced or repaired (and they could during rift dk1 era).

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#322

Post by juanmirocks »

I feel more understandable with Oculus in this one... Recently I also left an certificate, expire...

However, this affected only one single customer of ours and we had a fix within a couple of hours. -- I certainly learn from this mistake.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#323

Post by makecheck »

Rotation due to expired keys should be frequent, enough to pretty much require automated methods to handle the changes. (One of the many great things in LetsEncrypt.)

If it’s a much longer time scale, people start to forget that it’s even possible for stuff to expire.

If my fridge filter can display a little reminder light on a timer every few months, cryptography-dependent devices might need something similar. That way, your customers could know in advance and be asking you for an update.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#324

Post by tritium »

imtringued wrote: post #211
tritium wrote: post #20

Beside the fact that you should be concerned about whether the controlling company goes out of business, or sells your data, here stands yet another reason to never trust devices that require an internet connection to activate in the first place, or phone home periodically to remain active. This includes phones, cars, self-driving cars, watches, farm equipment, computing devices and anything marketed as an IoT applia…

The problem here is that kernel drivers have to be signed and drivers will stop working if the signature expires because the vendor didn't use a time stamp server during the signing process. The drivers were clearly indended to keep working so I assume this happened by accident. The big question is why on earth can drivers that have been verified and are already installed in your system can suddenly stop working? If…

Expiration after installation makes sense from the perspective of planned obsolescence, and in anticipation of long-term-support sunsets.

It makes absolutely no sense to the end user, acting as possessor or potentially a reseller of an object, since the very premise implies that an owner should not be provided total control over their device, that it's never really "theirs", and that a vendor should retain the capacity to take a "sold good" away from the owner, under the guise of expected behavior, built as designed, effectively converting a sale into a rental, in time, perhaps after statutes expire.

It's effectively a back door for manufacturers, so that they can count on well-made products not lasting forever, not in museums, not for resale, not for nostalgia.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#325

Post by CaptSpify »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #319
seba_dos1 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you basing medical appliance on such a walled-garden technology you aren't in control of, while there are more accessible alternatives? Oculus was already known for locking up fiascos, this really shouldn't be a surprise for you.

I think you underestimate how many companies build technologies off of walled gardens - especially in Healthcare.

Although you are correct, I don't see how that really matters. Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it a good idea.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#326

Post by amenod »

bringtheaction wrote: post #284
oooomm wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well every comment thread on the Internet related to the Rift issue mentioned this as a solution so it probably wasn't his idea.

Anyone who had an interest in computers in the mid 90-s to early 2000-s will remember trial software that was good for 30 days but which, if you set the clock back would give you the corresponding amount of extra time. I even seem to recall one that when I set the clock back much more than 30 days gave me as many more days beyond the 30 as as much as I had set it back. Then there were a couple pieces of software that…

With Macromedia Flash you had to write down the time when you stopped using it, then set it to a minute after it before running it again - because it remembered the last time it was running and refused to start if the new time was lower. Fun times. I could never have afforded Flash back then.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#327

Post by rixrax »

Oculus says you will receive $15 store credit if you used Oculus between Feb 1st and when it went kaput.

I don't see credit on my Oculus account? Am I supposed to have received it already? Or is this maybe because I don't have payment method added to my account?

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#328

Post by lostlogin »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #282
lostlogin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to assume you haven’t used many bits of medical equipment, because doing it for a job leads me to conclude that the software is more flakey than standard commercial software used day to day. Low sales volumes do not make for budgets high enough to support good debugging and development I guess.

I haven't worked in a medical lab (where our instruments were generally used). But I was a software developer for various medical devices for over 15 years and my conclusion was exactly the opposite: the software was far, far more robust than most commercial software.

It wasn’t radiology then (which would be the rough limit of my knowledge). PACs, MRI, CT, RIS, Angio gear, image intensifiers etc. All used over many years with weird glitches, reproducible errors including complete system crashes that take hours to get back and across several vendors.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#329

Post by pbhjpbhj »

agar wrote: post #297
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said a cert is required, but the footnote quote says drivers must be signed. Being signed doesn't expire. Could you rectify the discrepancy and explain why an expiring cert is a requirement for VR, your analysis (though clearly highly informed) seems spurious to me.

Good question. An expiring cert is not required for VR. It was a massive screw-up by Oculus. Most (I won't say all) certificates expire. However, there's a huge difference between an expired certificate and one which is renders a driver invalid - and this is one of the two places Oculus erred. When you sign a driver, you want it countersigned by a timeserver. This cryptographically assures that the cert used was vali…

Great answers, thanks.

I've not looked at the MS requirements, it seems good to expect signed drivers, but a signature shows that the company made that driver at that time - that should never expire.

Sure, also have a mechanism of certification that shows if a company vouches for a piece of software currently, but using that mechanism to override a [admin level] user and forcibly disable software, that's got to be always wrong.

Re: All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

#330

Post by dharmab »

nottorp wrote: post #230

So you're saying Rifts and Windows 10 drivers do not work offline? That basically Windows 10 will be functional only while Microsoft keeps the update servers on? Edit: I don't follow Windows, I'm really curious what the consequences for stuff like this can be generally.

No. The certificate in question is a code signing certificate, not a TLS certificate. Oculus incorrectly used an expiring certificate instead of a timestamped certificate here; if timestamped certificate was used, then the Rift driver would work offline forever.
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