6 ms·

> It's horrible how things like the Philips Hue bridge work and rely on insecure HTTP to control your home lighting. The Philips hue bridge REST API is accessi

by cryo 9y ago

> It's horrible how things like the Philips Hue bridge work and rely on insecure HTTP to control your home lighting. The Philips hue bridge REST API is accessible in the local network like http://192.168.1.123/api/ http://192.168.1.123/api/ .... which is great since apps/wepapps can talk to the bridge without a cloud or philips server inbetween. And this is the very problem, it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge without some sort of cloud roundtrip to a Philips server, keeping the very cool feature to talk only within the local network to the bridge. Because how could that be deployed without self-signed certificates and the usual browser exceptions and warnings?

bjpbakker 9y ago
> it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge without some sort of cloud roundtrip to a Philips server I don't see why not. The alternative is freedom. Philips doesn't have to lock their devices. That's a choice they made, sadly the choice that most companies make. > Because how could that be deployed without self-signed certificates and the usual browser exceptions and warnings? The fact that your browser warns you about insecure communication happening from that web page, that's a good thing. Even iff you deliberately choose accept that and believe that there's no other way for this particular service/device. The simple fact that you accept some insecure traffic, doesn't make it secure.
- qb45 9y ago
  > > it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge > I don't see why not. That's not a constructive argument. I don't see how they could make it work? Even if they somehow solve the problem of giving these devices domain names and even if they generate separate private key for each unit, the key and cert are going to be embedded in the firmware and a sufficiently sophisticated attacker will just extract them and become able to impersonate some Philips device. How the user of another device is going to tell whether he is connecting to his device or to malicious neighbor impersonating neighbor's device to establish Philips-signed HTTPS with the victim and then another connection to victim's device and MITM the victim? You would have to make all users install a trusted certificate authority tied to their individual device. Which is a UX disaster in current browsers and also a security disaster, because if this becomes a norm, sooner or later somebody will sell you a toy device bundled with a CA crafted to give him the ability to impersonate any website. And you'll trust this CA because you want to play with the toy. This maybe could be made to work with some improvements in browser UI. Make it easier to add new roots of trust. Make it easier to learn and/or limit what websites these certs will be authorized to authenticate. But nothing like that exists now. > The fact that your browser warns you about insecure communication happening from that web page, that's a good thing. [...] The simple fact that you accept some insecure traffic, doesn't make it secure. True. As somebody pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this warning will become another EU cookie banner nothingburger.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    > That's not a constructive argument. I don't see how they could make it work? Give each one a subdomain that resolves to its local IP, and give it a valid certificate for that subdomain. > extract them and become able to impersonate some Philips device. Or the attacker could just have a real, non-impersonated Philips device. If the user deliberately points their browser at the wrong device's site, nothing can save them. This is a very different problem from securing access to the correct site. > You would have to make all users install a trusted certificate authority tied to their individual device. That's not true, and I don't even understand what benefit that would have. If you have a way to deliver a CA, instead you should deliver the correct address of the device. This makes 'MitM' impossible without any downsides.
  - bjpbakker 9y ago
    > > > it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge > > I don't see why not. > That's not a constructive argument. I don't see how they could make it work? Missing from your quote: The alternative is freedom. Philips doesn't have to lock their devices. If Philips (and other companies, obviously this doesn't relate to just Philips) would provide a community access to their devices and software rather than locking them out, I believe that this problem would not exist. The original issue is that having a public website (used over TLS) that interacts with local network devices without TLS shows warnings about insecure communication. Again, the warning is shown because it /is/ insecure. There are plenty alternatives of securely interacting with an IOT device. Plain HTTP from a public website is just not one of them. For example, look at how Apple's Homekit has implemented that. Homekit is not usable from a public web page in a web browser. That's a good thing. (aside: I'm not a big fan of Homekit but their security is not bad) So if vendors are annoyed with browser warnings, it's because /they/ are doing the wrong thing, not the browsers. > sufficiently sophisticated attacker will just extract them and become able to impersonate some Philips device Just like on any website. Just because something isn't 100% unbreakable, doesn't mean it's a bad idea (you do lock your doors, don't you?)
    - cryo 9y ago
      > Missing from your quote: The alternative is freedom. Philips doesn't have to lock their devices. > If Philips (and other companies, obviously this doesn't relate to just Philips) would provide a community access to their devices and software rather than locking them out, I believe that this problem would not exist. The problem is technical and won't be fixed by just opening the software. > There are plenty alternatives of securely interacting with an IOT device. Please name just one which works for webapps, beside HTTPS. > So if vendors are annoyed with browser warnings, it's because /they/ are doing the wrong thing, not the browsers. Homekit is nice but not available to webapps, apps of course can take advantage of several security mechanisms. My whole rant is about browsers and HTTPS in non public networks. For webapps which want to talk to IoT devices there is only HTTPS and there is _no_ sane way to provide robust, local!, access to a LAN device via HTTPS. Here are some requirements: (actually real, I'm working on a IoT'ish product) * webapp must be served via HTTPS, either from the IoT device or vendor site * it just works! if webapp served from IoT device, the user shall not be required to install certificate or set exception (because it then looks like scary as hell malware) * the webapp must work offline (service worker or appcache) without internet connection * webapp must be able to talk directly to the device, no cloud or vendor server inbetween * the IoT device which provides a secured REST API might be in in a LAN which is NOT connected to the internet -- so the '<random-stuff-id>.vendor.com DNS resolves to device IP with an Lets Encrypt CA' approach won't work here (otherwise nice hack) To my knowledge it's technically not possible to build such a HTTPS secured webapp in a local network today without breaking the mentioned requirements.
- cryo 9y ago
  >I don't see why not. Well then please explain how this is possible?
cm2187 9y ago
If it is an http API, you don't really need a public certificate. You can have a long term selfsigned certificate on the device and you check that the thumbprint hasn't changed every time you connect from your client. These big warning windows are for connecting to it from a browser, not a RestClient.
- cryo 9y ago
  >These big warning windows are for connecting to it from a browser, not a RestClient. Which in my case is a webapp running in a browser :)
  - Jaruzel 9y ago
    Why not just proxy the REST requests through your own backend HTTPS server-app ?
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    So any random webpage can talk to your Hue bridge? I'm surprised they even allow such cross-domain requests, but this anyway doesn't seem safe.
    - cryo 9y ago
      Cross-domain is needed, otherwise an app/webapp couldn't talk to the bridge since the bridge only serves the REST API. However in order to send control commands and query light states the app/webapp needs to authenticate and create a account, which is only possible for a few seconds after pressing a physical bridge button.
lorenzhs 9y ago
We have the same issue with Glowing Bear (https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear). It's a web frontend for an IRC client (WeeChat) that connects directly to WeeChat via WebSockets. Sort of like self-hosted irccloud without a cloud. We really want everyone to use encrypted connections [0] and push people onto the TLS version of Glowing Bear. But some people host their WeeChat on their local network, and you can't (realistically) get a certificate for a local IP. So for those people we need to open an unencrypted websocket (ws://1.2.3.4), which isn't possible from an https site. Ideally we'd like to disallow unencrypted connections to non-local destinations but that's practically impossible to determine in JS. It's a super annoying problem. Disallowing unsafe websockets from secure origins is one of those policies that is a really good idea 99.5% of the time but for those last 0.5% of use cases, it's a major pain in the bum. [0] WeeChat has a /exec command to execute arbitrary commands, and the client has access to that --- not great when you transmit your password in plain text.

by cryo 9y ago

bjpbakker 9y ago

> it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge without some sort of cloud roundtrip to a Philips server I don't see why not. The alternative is freedom. Philips doesn't have to lock their devices. That's a choice they made, sadly the choice that most companies make. > Because how could that be deployed without self-signed certificates and the usual browser exceptions and warnings? The fact that your browser warns you about insecure communication happening from that web page, that's a good thing. Even iff you deliberately choose accept that and believe that there's no other way for this particular service/device. The simple fact that you accept some insecure traffic, doesn't make it secure.

qb45 9y ago
> > it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge > I don't see why not. That's not a constructive argument. I don't see how they could make it work? Even if they somehow solve the problem of giving these devices domain names and even if they generate separate private key for each unit, the key and cert are going to be embedded in the firmware and a sufficiently sophisticated attacker will just extract them and become able to impersonate some Philips device. How the user of another device is going to tell whether he is connecting to his device or to malicious neighbor impersonating neighbor's device to establish Philips-signed HTTPS with the victim and then another connection to victim's device and MITM the victim? You would have to make all users install a trusted certificate authority tied to their individual device. Which is a UX disaster in current browsers and also a security disaster, because if this becomes a norm, sooner or later somebody will sell you a toy device bundled with a CA crafted to give him the ability to impersonate any website. And you'll trust this CA because you want to play with the toy. This maybe could be made to work with some improvements in browser UI. Make it easier to add new roots of trust. Make it easier to learn and/or limit what websites these certs will be authorized to authenticate. But nothing like that exists now. > The fact that your browser warns you about insecure communication happening from that web page, that's a good thing. [...] The simple fact that you accept some insecure traffic, doesn't make it secure. True. As somebody pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this warning will become another EU cookie banner nothingburger.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > That's not a constructive argument. I don't see how they could make it work? Give each one a subdomain that resolves to its local IP, and give it a valid certificate for that subdomain. > extract them and become able to impersonate some Philips device. Or the attacker could just have a real, non-impersonated Philips device. If the user deliberately points their browser at the wrong device's site, nothing can save them. This is a very different problem from securing access to the correct site. > You would have to make all users install a trusted certificate authority tied to their individual device. That's not true, and I don't even understand what benefit that would have. If you have a way to deliver a CA, instead you should deliver the correct address of the device. This makes 'MitM' impossible without any downsides.
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  > > > it's not possible for Philips to add HTTPS support to the hue bridge > > I don't see why not. > That's not a constructive argument. I don't see how they could make it work? Missing from your quote: The alternative is freedom. Philips doesn't have to lock their devices. If Philips (and other companies, obviously this doesn't relate to just Philips) would provide a community access to their devices and software rather than locking them out, I believe that this problem would not exist. The original issue is that having a public website (used over TLS) that interacts with local network devices without TLS shows warnings about insecure communication. Again, the warning is shown because it /is/ insecure. There are plenty alternatives of securely interacting with an IOT device. Plain HTTP from a public website is just not one of them. For example, look at how Apple's Homekit has implemented that. Homekit is not usable from a public web page in a web browser. That's a good thing. (aside: I'm not a big fan of Homekit but their security is not bad) So if vendors are annoyed with browser warnings, it's because /they/ are doing the wrong thing, not the browsers. > sufficiently sophisticated attacker will just extract them and become able to impersonate some Philips device Just like on any website. Just because something isn't 100% unbreakable, doesn't mean it's a bad idea (you do lock your doors, don't you?)
  - cryo 9y ago
    > Missing from your quote: The alternative is freedom. Philips doesn't have to lock their devices. > If Philips (and other companies, obviously this doesn't relate to just Philips) would provide a community access to their devices and software rather than locking them out, I believe that this problem would not exist. The problem is technical and won't be fixed by just opening the software. > There are plenty alternatives of securely interacting with an IOT device. Please name just one which works for webapps, beside HTTPS. > So if vendors are annoyed with browser warnings, it's because /they/ are doing the wrong thing, not the browsers. Homekit is nice but not available to webapps, apps of course can take advantage of several security mechanisms. My whole rant is about browsers and HTTPS in non public networks. For webapps which want to talk to IoT devices there is only HTTPS and there is _no_ sane way to provide robust, local!, access to a LAN device via HTTPS. Here are some requirements: (actually real, I'm working on a IoT'ish product) * webapp must be served via HTTPS, either from the IoT device or vendor site * it just works! if webapp served from IoT device, the user shall not be required to install certificate or set exception (because it then looks like scary as hell malware) * the webapp must work offline (service worker or appcache) without internet connection * webapp must be able to talk directly to the device, no cloud or vendor server inbetween * the IoT device which provides a secured REST API might be in in a LAN which is NOT connected to the internet -- so the '<random-stuff-id>.vendor.com DNS resolves to device IP with an Lets Encrypt CA' approach won't work here (otherwise nice hack) To my knowledge it's technically not possible to build such a HTTPS secured webapp in a local network today without breaking the mentioned requirements.
cryo 9y ago
>I don't see why not. Well then please explain how this is possible?

cm2187 9y ago

If it is an http API, you don't really need a public certificate. You can have a long term selfsigned certificate on the device and you check that the thumbprint hasn't changed every time you connect from your client. These big warning windows are for connecting to it from a browser, not a RestClient.

cryo 9y ago
>These big warning windows are for connecting to it from a browser, not a RestClient. Which in my case is a webapp running in a browser :)
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Why not just proxy the REST requests through your own backend HTTPS server-app ?
- akvadrako 9y ago
  So any random webpage can talk to your Hue bridge? I'm surprised they even allow such cross-domain requests, but this anyway doesn't seem safe.
  - cryo 9y ago
    Cross-domain is needed, otherwise an app/webapp couldn't talk to the bridge since the bridge only serves the REST API. However in order to send control commands and query light states the app/webapp needs to authenticate and create a account, which is only possible for a few seconds after pressing a physical bridge button.

lorenzhs 9y ago

We have the same issue with Glowing Bear (https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear). It's a web frontend for an IRC client (WeeChat) that connects directly to WeeChat via WebSockets. Sort of like self-hosted irccloud without a cloud. We really want everyone to use encrypted connections [0] and push people onto the TLS version of Glowing Bear. But some people host their WeeChat on their local network, and you can't (realistically) get a certificate for a local IP. So for those people we need to open an unencrypted websocket (ws://1.2.3.4), which isn't possible from an https site. Ideally we'd like to disallow unencrypted connections to non-local destinations but that's practically impossible to determine in JS. It's a super annoying problem. Disallowing unsafe websockets from secure origins is one of those policies that is a really good idea 99.5% of the time but for those last 0.5% of use cases, it's a major pain in the bum. [0] WeeChat has a /exec command to execute arbitrary commands, and the client has access to that --- not great when you transmit your password in plain text.