Hacking the Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses
p0pcycle.comIt's really sad that getting a shell on a device you own is now considered a vulnerability.
I understand having a locked-down version of mass-produced tech that is for the general consumer. However, I also firmly believe that anyone who wants to should be able to bypass that. Make it void the warranty, don't allow customer support, whatever you want. But make it a free option to have complete control. If I buy a piece of hardware, I should own it.
(I say this as I am currently charging a cheap doorbell camera I bought, so that I can start dumping data from it and reverse engineer its protocol, solely so that I can lock it down to my local network...We needed something at the time, or I would have bought something more expensive that had an open protocol...)
In large, powerful and potentially dangerous machines, the firmware may embody safety features. Like preventing dangerous doses of radiation or overspeed conditions on motors or overcharging of batteries.
Why should you have a right to operate the device in a dangerous way that the manufacturer engineered to prevent?
You may be happy to injure yourself and to disclaim your right to warranty but the manufacturer could suffer immense reputational damage if, say, your hacking the firmware of their humanoid robot results in it tearing off your head.
> Make it void the warranty, don't allow customer support, whatever you want.
That would be a regression in terms of consumer rights, in my opinion. I don’t see why the EU shouldn’t legislate such that the right to control owned hardware becomes fundamental.
Technically, even in the US a warranty is only void if it's caused by something the consumer did; a 1 year warranty for production defects can't be voided.
Although I think it's fair that the company not have to deal with a defect that is almost certainly caused by something you do to your device. Like, strawman, but early iPhones sometimes encountered issues while doing an untethered jailbreak, or people would install tweaks that were less than stable (even sometimes on relatives' or friends' phones), then they would walk into an Apple Store with weird behavior and expect the fix to be free. That shouldn't be covered by warranty.
I am a proponent of giving users an option to root their devices through a one-way process that would surrender warranty coverage and print a big safety warning at every boot.
The problem with allowing easy shell access is that any arbitrary command execution would be used by exploits, too. There are also a lot of social engineering schemes that bait users into running commands on devices. We don’t think about these risks as engineers, but you wouldn’t believe how many people will follow instructions to open something like the Chrome developer console and paste code blocks into it because some website told them to.
So a secure device is also a locked down device. Getting a shell is a vulnerability because it’s the avenue that exploits would use.
That’s why I’d be in favor of a one-way developer mode, which provided shell access but printed a big unavoidable warning screen in the boot loader.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Asking people to give up their warrant isn’t legal, generally, so outside of very specific circumstances you have to cover warranty claims on the device, too. I have worked at companies that tried to offer some developer access like this, and the number of people abusing customer service because they got in over their heads with modifications and wanted a fresh unit or want CS to support their mods would make you face palm. So the compromises end up being things like only allowing ephemeral mods that get wiped at each reboot and other default-safe behaviors, but that doesn’t make people happy either.
Following the reasoning behind the magnuson-moss act, it should not automatically void the warranty. That puts users who want software freedom at a financial disadvantage.
I agree some big obvious scare message is good but actually voiding the warranty restricts user freedom.
"They might do something stupid with it" is just authoritarian. You would take our sticks
When something goes wrong, they blame you. They don’t care if anything they did caused it.
> You would take our sticks
Did you just completely ignore the entire point of my comment where I said I advocate giving people developer access?
Have all the sticks you want, but don’t come crying to the company if you hurt yourself.
> Have all the sticks you want, but
No deal.
Okay but that's how so many systems including banking are set up to safeguard users
This is a very neat and approachable write-up, but is the final result really a hack? If I understand correctly, you're getting an unprivileged shell on a device you own and have paired with your smartphone; more or less equivalent to installing a terminal emulator on your smartphone, except it's smart glasses in this case.
Should the ability to own one's devices really be treated as a vulnerability and reported to security teams?
Manipulating a system to get unintended access is a hack under any common definition.
The intent of the owner of the artifact is the only consideration. The wish of some previous owner is irrelevant.
The part you’re missing is your assumption that only the owner of the artifact would attempt to get access to the system.
Yes. Assumptions are being made.
It sounds like I should be considered a criminal because someone else might indeed be a criminal and I disagree.
If the next argument is you are unable to tell the difference myself and the criminal, then that is on you not me.
"hack" on hackernews essentially means "I used my computer to do something". The overwhelming population of people here aren't security engineers, but rather developers.
I considered that, but the mentions of pwn2own and the bug bounty program have me thinking "hack" is used in the security/mainstream sense.
Hack as a term predates the concept of cyber security. It was originally "a quick and dirty solution that is clever"
How is it not a hack to do something on a device that doesn't let you do it? Yes, the device should let you do whatever you want, but it doesn't, therefore this is a hack.
I'm going to try it on my glasses, and disable autoupdating ASAP.
Maybe I’ve still got the old PS3/PSP-exploit mentality, but reporting an arbitrary code execution vuln to the OEM is kind of sad… that deliberately closes a door for people to use their devices as they see fit.
Of course, the “don’t update after this firmware version” bit would always be the case (since any widely-distributed such vuln will be patched eventually), but deliberately moving the timeline to the left is sad.
Nice. How robust is this with software upgrades though? Also looks like arbitrary code execution in the app sandbox, so no persistance?
That's this thread. Did you mean to link another?
HN does post merges sometimes. Could be that?