3 ms·
> And, just because it is "dead" commercially does not mean there are not drivers in your OS watching for any traffic claiming to be ethernet, and eager to resp
by wolrah 4y ago
> And, just because it is "dead" commercially does not mean there are not drivers in your OS watching for any traffic claiming to be ethernet, and eager to respond to it.
It's not dead in that it never caught on, it's dead in that as far as I'm aware no one ever produced hardware that supported it. So no, there's no concern about it being used as a stealthy attack vector.
Also it's not exactly rocket surgery to see what network hardware your system sees available. All major general purpose OSes make it really easy to see what drivers are loaded, what hardware is attached, etc. Unless you want to propose that GPU and/or SoC vendors are hiding the fact that the hardware even exists until it's activated and rootkitting the OS to prevent the driver from being detected there is absolutely no reason to believe HEC is a threat to anyone anywhere.
Now, there could certainly hypothetically be exploits discovered against the CEC or ARC/eARC implementation but AFAIK ARC is generally implemented in dedicated hardware and CEC is simple enough to present a very limited attack surface.
- abeyer 4y ago> Also it's not exactly rocket surgery to see what network hardware your system sees available. All major general purpose OSes That's missing the point when the threat vector is a smart display running an opaque binary blob.
- Nextgrid 4y agoIt would still require something on the other side (set-top-box, computer, etc) to give it network access.
- abeyer 4y agoYes? That's exactly the attack that was being discussed -- plugging into a device that did that by default/without telling you/without giving the option to disable it, and possibly not even knowing it was happening. It sound from other discussions here that maybe that isn't very likely given that the network support sounds like it was seldom if ever implemented, but it's certainly a valid concern and the type of scenario I've come to expect from adversarial consumer device vendors who now seem focused less on their products than on how their products can be a conduit for data mining their 'customers'.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoMy Motorola RAZR had "Ethernet over HDMI" option in the settings. You know why I never knew if it really worked. And while I tried to find any evidence of that on the net I stumbled upon video[0] titled "Ethernet Over HDMI Is Useless"... from 2013 [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6-GgsiTgcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6-GgsiTgcM