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Is there a good data source/site that keeps up to date on which smart TVs have which surveillance elements and what can be done to disable them?
by jwsteigerwalt 3y ago
Is there a good data source/site that keeps up to date on which smart TVs have which surveillance elements and what can be done to disable them?
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoThis is actually a great argument for rooting (and unlocked devices in general), because there's no reason you shouldn't be able to just obtain a dump of the /system directory and upload it to Virustotal to see what's in there. But to answer your question, no, there's no easy way for even moderately technical people to find out what's in their system image, except when we get a report such as this one.
- brookst 3y agoWouldn’t a malicious device be smart enough to lie to you about what’s in /system?
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoTechnically, yes, but it is quite difficult to perform a realistic emulation of an OS with shell facilities, as evidenced by all the system emulation issues on SSH honeypots e.g. cowrie[1]. [1] https://github.com/cowrie/cowrie/issues https://github.com/cowrie/cowrie/issues
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThis is why the storage shouldn't be soldered. Then you could remove the drive and plug it into a known-clean system to inspect it. Technically the drive itself could have malicious firmware (and this is another reason open source device firmware is important; it allows researchers to poke around). But if the storage was removable then you could also replace the drive entirely and copy the original drive's contents to it. Then if the original drive was giving a clean copy if you attempt to dump its contents, the clean copy is what ends up on the new drive.
- cubefox 3y agoThe report didn't even say any smart TVs were affected, it only talks about smart TV boxes sold on Amazon, likely by some Chinese no name brand.