Hacking into Internet-Connected Light Bulbs • Hacker News Board

Post by e12e » Sun, Jul 06, 2014, 5:29 AM UTC

cryo wrote: post #38

TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruining the fun for everyone of us :(. Seriously, I dislike this trend of making everything a closed and encrypted black box accessible only through official channels (that will disappear in 3 years anyway) for reasons mostly related to money-making and not really security. I think this is will, if continued, slow down the rate of technological progress and development of new ideas. To quote pg, " It is by poking abo…

The hacker in me totally agrees with that point of view. It would be awesome to have a chance to decompile firmware and analyse and hack the communication protocols. But then security is important (which is true for almost all wireless stuff), things are quite different. It's pretty hard to build embedded devices which provide basic means of security without having a poor user experience.

If the security of the system relies on the system be secret, as opposed to the keys being secret, the system isn't secure... As have been shown again and again, you can't give someone the code (obfuscated, compiled, encrypted along with the decryption key) and also not give them the code.

So you'll slow down reversing, and probably deter most hobbyists -- but not anyone with anything tangible to gain from breaking your system. Personally I think "obviously insecure" is better than "might be somewhat safe".