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To suggest an alternative, all devices capable of internet communication must allow their traffic to be decrypted by their owner (how that password gets set is
by mLuby 8y ago
To suggest an alternative, all devices capable of internet communication must allow their traffic to be decrypted by their owner (how that password gets set is up to the individual device). This would allow owners who care to set up a man in the middle and confirm that all outgoing (and maybe even incoming) traffic to the device is what they expect. Any outgoing message that is not decryptable or not expected would be a red flag (which the vendor could try to explain if it is a non-spy message like an unusual error code).
Cryptographically I believe it is possible to encrypt a message such that either the user's key or the vendor's key can decrypt, but I'm not 100% sure.
- swiley 8y agoEasier is to just let the user compile and reflash the firmware themselves. But yeah you could give the user access to the devices private keys and certificate store.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoWhat you’re describing is possible and is done currently in corporate environments by forcing devices to accept a self signed cert that allows companies to spy on their employees traffic. Haven’t seen anything for the home market yet, and I’m not sure how you’d get a consumer IOT device to accept your cert.
- exelius 8y agoStick all your IoT stuff in a private VLAN and use a MITM proxy to decrypt / recrypt everything. I have yet to find a consumer device of any sort that lets you easily swap out SSL certs. Even the devices where it’s possible to set up LetsEncrypt will usually get overwritten by firmware updates.
- mLuby 8y agoRight, but how do you decrypt the vendor's encryption? That's why I think you'd need to be able to provide a second key, because if vendors give out their decrypt key they may as well send it all in plaintext.
- sebazzz 8y agoDoesn't work for apps which check for more than the certificate validity, for instance public key or the signer as well.
- mises 8y agoI recommend setting up a pfSense box with squid proxy and a self-signed root ca. It can decrypt essentially everything; works great.
- userbinator 8y agoWhenever the topic of MITM middleboxes comes up, there is usually a vehement opposition to them from much of the security community... while they bring up some valid points, I can't help but wonder if there is some deeper agenda behind that opposition, since these also seem to be the same people who are pushing the user-hostile walled gardens. (Personally have been using a MITM proxy on my network for over a decade. Besides the filtering, it also has a useful side-effect of upgrading all connections to TLS 1.2, and when 1.3 becomes more common or mandated, I only need to upgrade the OpenSSL the proxy uses to start using it for all TLS coming from the network. Even older devices that don't support it will still use it when communicating outside the network.)
- Gibbon1 8y agoOne of the ways to deal with IoT spying is with enforced standards so the end users doesn't rely on an untrusted black boxes in the 'cloud' for the services provided. You should be able to firewall your smart toaster so it can only communicate with a service under your control. In particular a service the manufacturer has no control over. Example for automobiles: OBD-II diagnostic ports.
- dcbadacd 8y agoThe solution to avoiding spying devices isn't MITM, it's making the devices run software that you can trust. If you buy an user-hostile walled garden then you frankly deserve it being hard to MITM.