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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

#351

Post by stordoff »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #291
52-6F-62 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the above commenter, but Google Earth VR is like something out of a sci-fi film from 20 years ago. I was sincerely impressed and enthralled. Of course, the more street views they can capture, the better it will get. There are other education experiences like BBC Home which is one of my favourites. Another, Mission:ISS allows you to explore the ISS and control the Canadarm to dock a module. Highly recommend them.…

Never heard of BBC Home before - http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/vr-spacewal... . I trust the developers aren't using license fee money but instead are paying for using the BBC name ...?

It seems inline with the BBC charter (it's a non-service activity which supports learning for people of all ages [one of the BBC's stated purposes], and helps fulfil the requirement that the BBC must promote technological innovation), so it would seem to be a reasonable use of license fee income. It could be seen in a similar vein as the BBC Micro, which was designed and built by Acorn.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/h...

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

#352

Post by borispavlovic »

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.…

That engineer earned himself a nice bonus. Hope he'll get it

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

#353

Post by zaarn »

gmueckl wrote: post #263
zaarn wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are usecases for signatures without timestamp. Besides, literally every codesigning blogpost/tutorial/guide/etc I found tells you to use a timestamping server so the guys and girls and Oculus must have skipped the critical parts of whatever they used.

What is a legitimate use case for a binary deliverable without a timestamped signature?

As you might have guessed, when you don't want someone to use a binary beyond a certain date.

Security Solutions could benefit from this, the customer will have to update or disable the signature check if their version of the solution becomes too old. Old versions could open them up to vulnerabilities.

Another might be when you distribute beta or testing versions of your software. The customers can safely test the version and the lack of timestamp prevents them from running it in production permanently. They have to update to the release version.

It could also be useful when you sell a software to a business and want them to test it first. So you send them the program without a timestamp signature and limit the validity of the certificate. That way they can't just run the test version forever.

Really anywhere where all parties involved, user and producer, do not want to run a binary forever but the producer might not fully trust the user to do that.

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

#354

Post by toomasr »

GoPro Desktop app's certificate expired more than a week ago and no update. I wonder if this will give them a nudge https://community.gopro.com/t5/GoPro-Apps-for-Desktop/Instal...

I thinks IT is used to managing HTTPS certificates, domain name auto-renewals but app level certs are more of a new thing.

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

#355

Post by dlubarov »

agar wrote: post #349
dlubarov wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 resp…

Thanks for clarifying; I didn't realize that was Windows' behavior.

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

#356

Post by ryanlol »

josteink wrote: post #245
ryanlol wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is especially true in a CI-setting, where this is one of those areas where signing and timestamping essentially makes a reliably and deterministic process (compiling code) into a unreliable and non-deterministic process, because builds can now fail randomly based on the state of a online timestamping service. Why are you signing your drivers during development? If not, how is the "unreliability" of timestamping…

I was referring to Windows code-signing in general, not drivers in particular. This kind of problem affects regular customer-facing applications too, and that's where I've worked hard to minimize the issues caused by the need for timestamping, while still doing things properly. (That is, if timestamping fails, the build SHOULD fail)

To me it hardly sounds like a problem for code-signing in general either.

You presumably don't need to sign your binaries during development, so you'll only be signing them when pushing updates to prod. I don't know how often and how urgently you usually do that, but it sounds like a small delay in pushing out prod builds caused by a timestamp server issue wouldn't be much of a problem to most orgs.

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

#357

Post by justinjlynn »

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 (…

So, it's basically a specialised-hacks-required-because-operating-systems-weren't-designed-with-it-in-mind-which-requires-driver-signing low-latency monitor for your face?

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

#358

Post by scoon1329 »

superkuh wrote: post #338
WillPostForFood wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers are necessary for the rift to function, and certs are necessary for drivers to function.

This is why half of the blame lies with Microsoft for following the rest of the industry into making software for grandma's protection at the detriment of software freedoms. An enterprising user can turn off these driver signing enforcement settings but it's quite a song and dance and first you have to even be aware of it.

The industry makes software for grandma's protection so that grandma can feel like she is safe using a computer to talk to her grandchildren.

In other words, the industry does this to try and make computing more accessible to a non-specialist audience. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

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

#359

Post by retox »

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.…

>one of our engineers figured out we could get our demo rigs working by setting the clock back a few days

The real MVP of this story. Sometimes a dirty hack is good enough.

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

#360

Post by salvar »

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.

I don't think you understand what a medical appliance is.
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