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Comment by scottlamb | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: MCUs are space-constrained and often don't include root certs that aren't used by the one host they talk to.

In my experience it's equally likely they just don't do validation to begin with. For example, my Elk M1XEP (physical security system's Ethernet expander) runs a configuration server with and without TLS. They recommend with, but it uses a self-signed certificate, and the crappy VB.NET configuration program doesn't validate the cert in any way, so it can be trivially MITMed. The Elk M1XEP also can connect to a user-chosen alarm monitoring service ("central station") over the Internet. I don't think it uses TLS at all for this. I think there's optional shared secret auth/encryption?

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Over a decade ago, I created an AWS ELB to serve a production API. It was HTTPS-only, using an Amazon-signed certificate served from ACM for my employer's domain. Right after deployment, logs showed a regular pattern of 404s trying to POST/PUT to my API at paths I didn't support. Thousands of requests per hour, and they continued for days. It didn't look like a DoS--the paths looked like someone else's API.

I got curious what all the traffic was, so I added a route to the API that saved some of the uploaded data. It was live home surveillance video and photos! Indoors, outdoors, baby monitors, living rooms, etc. It was pretty easy to find which vendor's hardware was doing this (from headers, paths, watermarks) and I reached out to their security contact to let them know what I found. They responded generically but didn't seem to care that much.

In short, because HTTPS was required, and an ELB gets assigned IPv4 addresses arbitrarily, I can only conclude that a whole fleet of home security cameras were sold across the US that hard-coded the IP address of their cloud server and had certificate validation disabled.

This is unfortunately accurate, sometimes due to real constraints and more often due to loose threat models. I am hopeful that more open source firmware options (e.g. Zephyr RTOS) and more software investment from silicon vendors is helping to change the status quo. That being said, we are still a long way away from a "Let's Encrypt movement" for embedded devices.

> sometimes due to real constraints

IMO this should always be pushed back against, because it's not a valid excuse. If the hardware is too constrained to support appropriate security then that hardware is not appropriate for the application (or no longer appropriate for the application, as the story often goes).

To be clear, I agree that it is not a valid excuse and pushback is warranted.

Unless you plan to assign your Ethernet expander a domain name, how do you expect it to participate in WebPKI? The vendor similarly has no interest in explaining its buyers how to do that so it can connect "securely" to their particular alarm monitoring service.

There are some goodish options for how we could secure communications with local network devices hosting simple configuration WebUIs, but the browser vendors have overwhelmingly demonstrated that they have no interest in any of them. So what you ship is HTTP, not even the self-signed certificate, that just gets scary messages.

(What the browser vendors seem to want, to be clear, is that your gadget reaches out securely to the Vendor Cloud^TM, and you similarly use your Google and Apple notarized smartphone to reach out to that same Cloud, so you can talk to the hardware sitting a meter away from you)

> Unless you plan to assign your Ethernet expander a domain name, how do you expect it to participate in WebPKI?

Well, it does support DDNS, [1] so presumably some people do assign it a domain name. But I don't expect it to participate in WebPKI necessarily. That's not the only way to secure communication from the config program to the device, e.g.:

* The routers I worked on in 2006 had baked-in keys/certs signed by our own CA with cn based on serial number rather than reachable customer-chosen FQDN. That's not WebPKI but it actually works. Elk's configuration software knows the expected serial number and could use a similar approach. The configuration is not http-based (much less browser-based) anyway.

* It'd be better to just punt and say the communication should be secured by proxy or VPN or something than to offer TLS in a misleading way and suggest it should be directly exposed to the Internet.

As for the Ethernet expander to the central station, that totally could use TLS and WebPKI.

[1] https://elk-manuals.s3.amazonaws.com/M1XEP_v2_Installation_M... page 14

> physical security system

> can be trivially MITMed

Crazy how poor security can be even from a purported security vendor.

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