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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

#341

Post by rb808 »

jlgaddis wrote: post #174
rb808 wrote: post #17

Has anyone got a good way of managing certificates in the wild? With no real management and staff turnover I've seen a bunch of expired certificate problems. EDIT: presumably you need your client apps/libraries in the field write back when they use a cert that is <X months away from expiry.

Define "managing"? I use simple Nagios checks for keeping an eye on certificate expiration. It's simple to set up checks for new hosts/services and I have them set to trigger an e-mail alert 30 days before expiration (20 days for certificates from Let's Encrypt). It does the job; I have yet to wake up one day to an expired certificate. Apparently, this ("send me an e-mail before my certificate expires") is also the s…

I think 30 days might not be enough - maybe its best to create a new certificate every build or every month.

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

#342

Post by therein »

agar wrote: post #274
teawrecks wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like a cert is necessary for it to function. A VR headset is basically a monitor you wear on your face. This is their own poor design choice that just ensures they're going to lose business of anyone who needs reliability in their headset.

The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (…

> Not to mention, the system creates a virtual monitor so you can see your 2D desktop while in VR. You can reach out and "grab" a window, rip it from the desktop and position it in your VR world. Pin it, and when you enter a game that window remains and is fully interactive with the Touch controllers emulating a mouse. Maybe you want to play Spotify in the background of a table tennis game, or be able to check a Discord screen while working through a puzzler, or watch YouTube videos while flying your ship in Elite:Dangerous. One guy set up a video feed from his baby monitor so he could watch his kid napping while in VR. This is obviously not a standard feature of the Windows compositor.

Wait, is this new. I haven't used my Oculus in over 6 months because of how hard it was to interact with the desktop and a few other things while in-game. Is this standard feature now for Oculus' Framework?

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

#343

Post by y_tho »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #307
mattnewport wrote: post #181

Our VR surgical training startup has been working for the last few months towards a big medical conference this week where we're showing multiple training procedures for multiple customers on Oculus Rift, as well as having our own booth. The headsets all stopped working the morning of the conference. Fortunately one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days.…

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.

Wouldn't be the first time in the industry: https://twitter.com/JanHenrikH/status/910754596422868992/pho...

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

#344

Post by jlgaddis »

jandrese wrote: post #269
jlgaddis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "managing"? I use simple Nagios checks for keeping an eye on certificate expiration. It's simple to set up checks for new hosts/services and I have them set to trigger an e-mail alert 30 days before expiration (20 days for certificates from Let's Encrypt). It does the job; I have yet to wake up one day to an expired certificate. Apparently, this ("send me an e-mail before my certificate expires") is also the s…

What happens when you leave for a different job or get hit by a bus? More than one cert has expired because the guy who was maintaining them moved on and nobody else knew how to keep them up to date. Obviously it should be part of a handoff process when you leave, but companies aren't always good at smoothly handling transitions like this.

I've been hit by a bus! Well, a Jeep Cherokee, technically, but I was on a motorcycle so it felt like a bus. I was off work for ~4 months -- couldn't even walk for the first three and could barely feed myself. We managed, though. We got by and didn't have any SHTF moments in my absence.

What happens if I leave, though? I don't know and, TBH, I won't really care; it won't be my problem at that point. How -- if -- things are handed off or transferred off to someone else when I leave will be up to my boss, I suppose.

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

#345

Post by AboutTheWhisles »

mattnewport wrote: post #181

Our VR surgical training startup has been working for the last few months towards a big medical conference this week where we're showing multiple training procedures for multiple customers on Oculus Rift, as well as having our own booth. The headsets all stopped working the morning of the conference. Fortunately one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days.…

Welcome to the future.

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

#346

Post by agar »

therein wrote: post #342
agar wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (…

> Not to mention, the system creates a virtual monitor so you can see your 2D desktop while in VR. You can reach out and "grab" a window, rip it from the desktop and position it in your VR world. Pin it, and when you enter a game that window remains and is fully interactive with the Touch controllers emulating a mouse. Maybe you want to play Spotify in the background of a table tennis game, or be able to check a Disc…

This is in late beta, but anyone can opt in, try it, and opt out if it's not ready for them.

But I use it and it's amazing.

Edit: Here's the "sizzle reel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvP_RI_S-bw

Here's just someone using Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMjlM5vFSA0

And here's a blog post about it: https://www.oculus.com/blog/rift-core-20-updates-beta-coming...

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

#347

Post by p1necone »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #333
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see the exclusives as a negative Would anyone with a straight face say the same about Nintendo's exclusives? I don't see anyone else in the market funding great things like Medium, Quil, Lone Echo, Robo Recall. Feels it's just cutting off your nose to spite your face to complain about this.

No, because the Switch is a game console whose hardware is produced by Nintendo to run Nintendo approved software. It doesn't allow homebrew by default and is a closed platform, and pretty much everyone buying one knows this. An Oculus is not a standalone product; it is a peripheral that relies on an open PC platform for its processing. If software the Oculus uses can run on any PC and the Oculus does not have a uniq…

Very well put. Can you imagine if say Logitech funded a flight simulator that only supported their joysticks, or Samsung funded a game that would only run on their monitors?

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

#348

Post by boojums »

rixrax wrote: post #327

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?

Oculus sent out an email mentioning the $15 store credit. That email mentions it might take up to 7 days to get the credit.

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

#349

Post by agar »

dlubarov wrote: post #340
agar wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rereading your question, I realize I may have not actually answered an underlying topic: what is the difference between a certificate and a signature? The short answer is: - a "certificate" contains a number of things: a portion of an asymmetric key (either public or private), and a ton of metadata[1] to give information about that key: validity period, algorithms used, version, etc. - a "signature" is the result of…

> So if that creation certificate expires (or is revoked) it calls into question the validity of the signature(s) created from that certificate. Are you arguing that already-installed drivers should no longer be trusted? I can't tell. If a cert expires at time T, the usual assumption is that forging signatures before T is not feasible (otherwise the expiration was poorly chosen), while forging signatures after T migh…

To be clear, I'm not arguing that old, already-installed drivers should fail if not countersigned. This seems like an extreme, and customer-unfriendly failure case. However, I am saying that this appears to be the default implementation of Windows 10 build 1607+.

I won't argue it's right or wrong, actually. It's a choice, with different threat models driving different conclusions. Defining the failure modes with respect to security risks is a fraught business, and I hope Microsoft put a great deal of thought into it and has far more visibility into the risks than I. But it's what they appear to do, and we live in their world.

I argued elsewhere (in a late, top-level comment somewhere) that - if this is Windows's failure mode - MS should provide tools for devs to integrate into their build process that flags risky or mis-configured signature scenarios. This is too complicated, and used by too many non-security experts, with extreme failure modes, for it to be half-ass-able or easily done wrong.

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

#350

Post by agar »

retromario wrote: post #335
agar wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "monitor you wear on your face" trope is simply inaccurate, and essentially a misunderstanding of the state of VR today. I say this not to either criticize you or excuse the mistake by Oculus (they really needed to countersign their cert with a timestamp server), but to educate. These are non-obvious issues to people that don't follow the VR sector. Monitors work without low-level drivers because their maturity (…

> For the Rift, the hand controllers are wireless input devices refreshing at 1,000Hz; Could you share more info on this? Is it actually possible to poll the devices at that resolution from code?

I believe it is possible, though I doubt many people look at the raw data due to its limited usefulness. Without sensor fusion between the IMU (or inertial measurement unit, AKA electronic gyroscope) and various other inputs (including dead reckoning via external sensors), drift error rapidly accumulates.

So, the SDK takes all the information in directly, does its calculations, and exposes only the resulting positions and orientations for hands and head. This resulting info is what developers typically use.

Here's an excerpt from a blog post[1] regarding the IMU and sensor fusion:

> With the new Oculus VR™ sensor, we support sampling rates up to 1000hz, which minimizes the time between the player’s head movement and the game engine receiving the sensor data to roughly 2 milliseconds.

>

> In addition to raw data, the Oculus SDK provides a SensorFusion class that takes care of the details, returning orientation data as either rotation matrices, quaternions, or Euler angles.

Note that this blog is from back in dev kit 2 days. It's possible that Oculus removed the ability to retrieve raw data; in my hobbyist efforts I only use Unity's integration and don't work directly against the SDK.

[1] https://www.oculus.com/blog/building-a-sensor-for-low-latenc...

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