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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> If the remote machines have the assumption of trustworthy terminals baked in,

Given the general competence level of the engineering at SpaceX, I would not put any money on this being true.

Maybe if the system were designed by Sony...

When I worked at SpaceX, lots of software folk used an internal IRC server. One time I created a chatbot that would execute arbitrary python commands on my workstation. Knowing that coworkers would maliciously try to pwn my computer, I ran it in a chroot with very restricted permissions. It took about 20 minutes for someone to figure out how to fork bomb it hard enough to lock up my system.

Another time as a team building activity, we were using mission control and backup mission control to play a multiplayer space ship bridge simulator game. My team was winning, up until our terminals started failing. Someone on the other team had credentials to the IT system, and was remotely rebooting them.

If alls fair in love and war, at that point I’d start yanking power cables in response. ;)

Kobayashi Maru

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru

Sounds like a fun time and good consistent reminder that malicious actors can be everywhere :-)

(That said I'd be pissed)

I know it's somewhat unlikely, but I was replying to someone who couldn't even see the potential value of a hacked terminal as the entry point to an attack chain.

You are completely right about the potential magnitude of the hack, but my first approach was purely as an individual consumer, this doesn't affect me. Seeing this as an engineer...yikes

Even Sony doesn't considers its terminals trustworthy.

They really don't want you to root your PlayStation, but that's mostly because it allows you to hack offline games. Hacked consoles are usually banned pretty quickly from online services.

It doesn't mean Sony has the best track record when it comes to security just that they are not completely clueless.

OP may indicates PS3's poor security drama.

PS3 was one of the more secure consoles but of course it only takes one vulnerability.

I was a big fan of modded playstation portables back in the day, to do it you would take a particular model of battery and remove one terminal or something similar which would activate a debug mode that let you flash it.

They fixed that with the newer batteries as I recall but was a pretty big hole at release

Ah, the old and beautiful Pandora battery. It was magic, you could recover every bricked PSP with it, i hate that no other device can do something like that.

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