Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Comments
IoT Product Safety: If It Appears Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is
Newest First  |  Oldest First  |  Threaded View
stephen56
stephen56,
User Rank: Apprentice
3/17/2018 | 3:08:08 PM
IOT devices are insecure by design, not repair
Ugh. So much speculation and so few facts.  

First, anyone that has actuallty read the proposed legislation in 18 states would notice that the only information, firmware, parts, tools and diagnostics required are those ALREADY being provided to thousands of repair techs around the world. None of this information is secret, and most of it is arleady available illegally in asia.  Legislation is carefully targeted for the sole purpose of allowing legal competition for repair services at the choice of the owner. 

Even when the equipment being repaired is being used for a security function (such as a security camera), the application run on cpu within the camera is irrelevant to repair.   The camera either passes a signal correctly or it does not.  Someone has to repair the camera, and give it back to the owner.  Its the owner that cares about his or her security -- and its still the owner that gets to decide whom to trust for repair.  

If anyone has any doubts of the responsibility of the OEM to protect the security of the owner, just read the purchase contract closely,  Every contract always dislaims responsibility for how equipment is used and carefull limits their risk and potential damages in that contract.

As to actual cyber risk -- equipnent is either secure by design, or insecure.  Sadly, millions of IOT devices are being thrown into the marketplace with weak or absent security -- allowing botnets and other hacks to proliferate worldwide.  These devices are already up and running and attached to a network, unlike devices which are broken and offline.   Equipment under repair is among the most secure because its offline. 

Opponents to Right to Repair have gleefully suggested that consumers will lose personal data without any explaination of how that might happen.  We've yet to hear of anyone losing personal data as the result of an iPhone repair -- because Apple does an excellent job of security and encryption.  Apple has even stated publically that despite their source code being posted on the internet, personal security was never at risk. 

Happy to discuss any real examples of how repair as a business has made IOT devices less secure. 

 

 
ccashell
ccashell,
User Rank: Apprentice
3/12/2018 | 11:47:00 PM
Seriously? The misinformation is strong with this one.
Wow, there is a lot of misinformation, confusion, and good old fashioned "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" (FUD) in this article.  It almost reads like a paid piece from a hardware manfuacturer.

I'm a little amazed that someone would write such a weak and unsubstatianted article in a time when Linux has become the foundation of most mobile and many IoT devices.  When every Android smartphone has it's base operating system source code available for anyone, your argument needs a lot more than vague hints and bad analogies to be reasonable.

The simple fact is that IoT devices are in such a horrible and sad state with regards to security that it's hard to imagine how it could get much worse.  Mandating that information is available for people and communities to attempt to improve or fix issues at least leads to options.

I want to write more, but it's just hard to even take this article seriously.


Edge-DRsplash-10-edge-articles
I Smell a RAT! New Cybersecurity Threats for the Crypto Industry
David Trepp, Partner, IT Assurance with accounting and advisory firm BPM LLP,  7/9/2021
News
Attacks on Kaseya Servers Led to Ransomware in Less Than 2 Hours
Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer,  7/7/2021
Commentary
It's in the Game (but It Shouldn't Be)
Tal Memran, Cybersecurity Expert, CYE,  7/9/2021
Register for Dark Reading Newsletters
White Papers
Video
Cartoon
Current Issue
Everything You Need to Know About DNS Attacks
It's important to understand DNS, potential attacks against it, and the tools and techniques required to defend DNS infrastructure. This report answers all the questions you were afraid to ask. Domain Name Service (DNS) is a critical part of any organization's digital infrastructure, but it's also one of the least understood. DNS is designed to be invisible to business professionals, IT stakeholders, and many security professionals, but DNS's threat surface is large and widely targeted. Attackers are causing a great deal of damage with an array of attacks such as denial of service, DNS cache poisoning, DNS hijackin, DNS tunneling, and DNS dangling. They are using DNS infrastructure to take control of inbound and outbound communications and preventing users from accessing the applications they are looking for. To stop attacks on DNS, security teams need to shore up the organization's security hygiene around DNS infrastructure, implement controls such as DNSSEC, and monitor DNS traffic
Flash Poll
Twitter Feed
Dark Reading - Bug Report
Bug Report
Enterprise Vulnerabilities
From DHS/US-CERT's National Vulnerability Database
CVE-2023-33196
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences. Cross site scripting (XSS) can be triggered by review volumes. This issue has been fixed in version 4.4.7.
CVE-2023-33185
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Django-SES is a drop-in mail backend for Django. The django_ses library implements a mail backend for Django using AWS Simple Email Service. The library exports the `SESEventWebhookView class` intended to receive signed requests from AWS to handle email bounces, subscriptions, etc. These requests ar...
CVE-2023-33187
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Highlight is an open source, full-stack monitoring platform. Highlight may record passwords on customer deployments when a password html input is switched to `type="text"` via a javascript "Show Password" button. This differs from the expected behavior which always obfuscates `ty...
CVE-2023-33194
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web.The platform does not filter input and encode output in Quick Post validation error message, which can deliver an XSS payload. Old CVE fixed the XSS in label HTML but didn’t fix it when clicking save. This issue was...
CVE-2023-2879
PUBLISHED: 2023-05-26
GDSDB infinite loop in Wireshark 4.0.0 to 4.0.5 and 3.6.0 to 3.6.13 allows denial of service via packet injection or crafted capture file