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Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

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Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#61
post #5

While cool and slightly scary news - Samsung TV's have been incredibly hackable for the past decade, wouldn't be surprised if GPT2 with access to a browser could hack a Samsung!

This is some serious revisionist history. GPT-2 wasn't instruction-following or even conversational.

it's a joke about the quality of samsung tv's rather than a serious comment - i should have said a perceptron could hack a samsung tv

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#62
All the news regarding AI finding weaknesses or "hacking" stuff - is that actually hacking? Isn't it also a kind of bruteforce attack? Just throw resources at something, see what comes out. Yea, some software security issues haven't been found for 15 years, but not because there were no competent security specialists out there who could have found it, but most likely because there is a lot of software and nobody has time to focus on everything. Of course, an AI trained on decades of findings, lots of time and lots of resources, can tackle much more than one person. But this is not revolutionary technological advance, it is an upscaling of a kind based on the work of many very talented people before that.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#63
post #62

All the news regarding AI finding weaknesses or "hacking" stuff - is that actually hacking? Isn't it also a kind of bruteforce attack? Just throw resources at something, see what comes out. Yea, some software security issues haven't been found for 15 years, but not because there were no competent security specialists out there who could have found it, but most likely because there is a lot of software and nobody has…

I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#64
post #62

All the news regarding AI finding weaknesses or "hacking" stuff - is that actually hacking? Isn't it also a kind of bruteforce attack? Just throw resources at something, see what comes out. Yea, some software security issues haven't been found for 15 years, but not because there were no competent security specialists out there who could have found it, but most likely because there is a lot of software and nobody has…

I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?

Well what kind of meaning do you find in brute force? I'm not saying it's not effective. I just critisize the news that make it look like AI is the a revolutionary advance in security. It is not. It makes skills available to many more people which is cool, but it is based off of training - training on things people did. It doesn't magically find a new combination of factors that lead to a security issue, it tries things it's read about. That's not meaningless. It could even be democratizing in a way. I just hate all this talk that "this model is too scary to release in the world".

But I'm happy about any feedback or critique, I might just be wrong honestly.

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#65
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many eons ago I wrote a Python version of tmpcli for this exact reason. Made some minor improvements a few years ago but haven’t touched it since. Curious what methodology Codex came up with, I haven’t revisited it since models got really good. The idea is that tmpServer listens on localhost, but dropbear allows port forwarding with admin creds (you’ll need to specify -N). That program has full device access and is t…

Ha kudos! I went across this project - thanks for your work :) It didn't work on the specific model I own (Archer NX600). My solution is really just using their pseudo-JWT over their obscured APIs (with reverse-engineered names of endpoints and params). Limitation is that there is still only one client allowed to be authenticated at one moment, so my daemon has priority and I need to stop it to actually access Admin…

Of course! Happy to contribute. As is the case with your device, there's a lot of weird TP-Link firmware variants (even an RTOS called TPOS based on VxWorks), so no guarantee it'll work all the time. Glad there's more research being done in the space!

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#66
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on my long list of projects "to-opensource" (but I need to figure out licensing, for those things CC-BY-SA I think is the way to go), I don't want a random lawyer sitting on my ass though. I started with a simple assumption: if I can access the router via web-browser, then I can also automate that. From that the proof-of-concept was headless Chrome in Docker and AI-directed code (code written via LLM, not using…

You should give codex access to the mobile app :) The app, for a lot of routers, connects via an ssh tunnel to UDP/TCP sockets on the router. Would probably give you access to more data/control.

Made a comment up above, but that's tdpServer and tmpServer (sometimes tdpd and tmpd) and it's what I use in my python implementation of tmpcli, the (somewhat broken) client binary on some TP-Link devices.

You're correct, it gives you access to everything the Tether app can do.

https://github.com/ropbear/tmpcli

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#67

Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.

I am not sure "fun" is the right term here!

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#68

I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with C…

Any tips to share? I tried to do something similar but failed. My router has a backup/restore feature with an encrypted export, I figured I could use that to control or at least inspect all of its state, but I/codex could not figure out the encryption.

I had fun “hacking” my router that turned out to be just unzipping the file with slight binary modifications, it was so simple in fact I just implemented it in a few lines of js, even works in the browser :-D

https://ivank.github.io/ddecryptor/

Re: Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

#69
post #42

> Reading the matching ntkdriver sources is also where the Novatek link became clear: the tree is stamped throughout with Novatek Microelectronics identifiers, so these ntk* interfaces were not just opaque device names on the TV, but part of the Novatek stack Samsung had shipped. Lol, a true classic in the embedded world. Some hardware company (it appears these guys make display panel controllers?) ships a piece of h…

Board Support Package for us civilians.

Yeah, sorry, assumed it was common knowledge. For those out of the loop - a BSP usually consists of a frankensteined mess: a bootloader (often u-boot but sometimes something homebrew), a Linux kernel with a ton of proprietary modules and device-specific hacks to work around HW quirks, basic userspace utilities (often buildroot), some bastardized build tooling building all of that, some solution for firmware upgrades and distribution, and demo programs to prove the hardware actually works.

Most of the BSP is GPL'd software where the final product manufacturer should provide the sources to the general public, but all too often that obligation gets sharted upon, in way too many cases you have to be happy if there are at least credits provided in the user manual or some OSD menu.

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