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Comment by klausa | Hacker News Reader

I think this is oversimplifying things.

Is finishing the dinner more important than applying a patch that fixes actively exploited bug that locks your oven into cleaning mode and burns everything inside into ash over the next three hours? Or something that disables the safety checks and lets the oven overheat and burn your house down?

(Granted, the latter shouldn't physically be possible because it should have physical temperature killswitches etc.)

People always (understandably so!) consider software updates to be annoyances; but especially when you give an example like _an oven_, the potential for _catastrophic_ failures is too great.

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One my favorite IoT botnet scenarios is an attacker taking control of thousands of ovens/air conditions/other high-wattage devices and using them to cause power outages. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

I wonder how the impulse to connect everything to the internet will be remembered.

The flip side of that is you can use control of all those high wattage devices to prevent power outages by shifting load to times when more energy is available.

Hopefully, that's how the impulse will be remembered.

Or by the rise of salmonela infections...

I think it works best when the consumer gets to decide. If a car recall comes along because the seat belts in your car have been shown to actually kill people in accidents, would you blow off your weekend plans to get your car fixed as soon as possible or would you go to your thing then bring the car to the manufacturer on Monday? There will be people on both sides of that decision and, ideally, we should let them choose.

These seem like very rare scenarios. If we're concerned about dire threats like this, the manufacturer needs a way to remotely send devices into an internet-disconnected "safe mode" before anyone's even talking about updates.

How do you, as a user, determine whether your oven is in "safe mode" that the manufacturer has toggled, or in "safe mode" that makes the UI look the same as the real one, but is actually a malicious code that waits until 3AM to start the cleaning mode?

I agree that these scenarios are (relatively) far fetched _now_; but if we expect the future to include connecting appliances like that to the internet, then solving problems like those is table-stakes stuff.

I understand that enforced software updates are annoying; but for high-stakes environments like this they strike me as a lesser of the two evils.

If the attacker has total control, then all bets are off no matter what mechanisms you put in first. Adding a safe mode would at least allow manufacturer to stop any non-total exploit without relying on the more complicated update mechanism. Also, the appliance would more likely work in a kinda normal way in the meantime.

>If the attacker has total control, then all bets are off no matter what mechanisms you put in first.

Great, so we now agree that it's important to keep the system patched and up to date.

That depends on updates never introducing new vulnerabilities.

I didn't say otherwise. Only that a forced update mechanism is insufficient for stakes as high as burning down the house. Maybe the patch fails to download/install, or they take too long to develop the patch in the first place, or the patch doesn't work for all models on the first try. There needs to be a simple kill switch if we're talking about threats like this.

Besides that, the safe mode oven should still be able to cook food manually.

Just as smart people agree that the manufacturer knows nothing about the situation at the appliance, and a forced update mechanism a la the first iteration of Windows forced updated ("update's here, restarting, too bad you're currently doing important stuff that won't be saved") is a stupid idea and outside of private use often a non-starter. That kind of condescension is generally only something you can do to private tech users.

Though I guess making the experience frustrating could keep more people from needlessly connecting everything to the network because it sound futuristic...

> If the attacker has total control, then all bets are off no matter what mechanisms you put in first.

You could have a second SoC on the device running off ROM, whose only purpose is handling this safe mode and controlling internet access of the main device. Keep it simple and make it essentially just a fuse that can be blown (turning off internet access) by a signed message from the manufacturer. Keep the hardware capability of this SoC to just that, so even if you have a vulnerability on that thing itself, an attacker can't really do anything with it. Keep the code running on that SoC simple and preferably make it a FSM that is proven to be free of vulnerabilities. Also make sure the main device can't interfere with it in any way.

Once the fuse is blown, the user needs to press a physical button on the device to re-enable internet access. Preferably ship the devices with this internet access disabled by default.

Even better yet, don't build an internet connected oven... but that ship has sailed in many areas.

Ideally yeah, the bar for critical appliances would be high enough for this. If not, disabling IP at the OS level would still be pretty good.

> If we're concerned about dire threats like this, the manufacturer needs a way to remotely send devices into an internet-disconnected "safe mode" before anyone's even talking about updates.

This was exactly my thought. Download the update then take the device offline until it's applied if the update contains a security vulnerability.

If these are the kind of things we are worried about then the correct course of action is to ban needlessly internet connected devices. Your need for twitter on your fridge doesn't outweigh the botnet threat it poses.

Idk if that can be done, but anyway, I don't want to hear these scary threats thrown out as excuses for whatever policy the manufacturer puts in place. If the threat model really is burning down the house, you need a lot more than some forced updates to protect you.

You make a good point, but this kills me. I've been writing software a long time, and there's nothing I trust less to control my oven than software. God help us. I yearn for simple physical controls

Finishing dinner can be more important than the house not burning down. A burned down house is likely insured. A dinner with a potential business client is not.

Surely this has to be a joke.

Could be a reference to steamed hams

It’s just the Northern Lights.

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