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Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

259 points by campuscodi 6mo ago

linzhangrun 6mo ago
[flagged]
endymion-light 6mo ago
While cool and slightly scary news - Samsung TV's have been incredibly hackable for the past decade, wouldn't be surprised if GPT2 with access to a browser could hack a Samsung!
- valleyer 6mo ago
  This is some serious revisionist history. GPT-2 wasn't instruction-following or even conversational.
  - patrickmcnamara 6mo ago
    Hyperbole.
    - jdiff 6mo ago
      It's really not. It was a fun toy but had very little utility. It could generate plausible looking text that collapsed immediately upon any amount of inspection or even just attention. Code generation wasn't even a twinkle in Altman's eye scanning orbs at that point.
      - tomalbrc 6mo ago
        Talking about revisionist…
      - smoghat 6mo ago
        But like Mythos, it was too dangerous to release. https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-generating-algorithm-ai-dangerous.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...
        wongarsu 6mo ago
        And the "too dangerous to release" capability was writing somewhat plausible news articles based on a headline or handwritten beginning of an article. In the same style as what you had written Today we call that "advanced autocomplete", but at the time OpenAI managed to generate a lot of hype about how this would lead to an unstoppable flood of disinformation if they allowed the wrong people access to this dangerous tool. Even the original gpt3 was still behind waitlists with manual approval
        someguyiguess 6mo ago
        And as it turns out, they were correct.
      - kube-system 6mo ago
        I think you misunderstand the comment you replied to. They are saying the above comment was a rhetorical exaggeration of GPT-2's capabilities as a commentary on how low quality Samsung TV software is. They don't actually think GPT-2 was very capable. It is a figure of speech, not a literal statement.
    - valleyer 6mo ago
      If so, I apologize.
  - endymion-light 6mo ago
    it's a joke about the quality of samsung tv's rather than a serious comment - i should have said a perceptron could hack a samsung tv
    - valleyer 6mo ago
      Fair enough, sorry :)
  - michaelcampbell 6mo ago
    And yet Dario in his OpenAI days was proclaiming it too scary to be released. Now why does that sound familiar...?
- huflungdung 6mo ago
  [dead]
Razengan 6mo ago
[flagged]
- zx8080 6mo ago
  What is going on there? What double s?
- rossvc 6mo ago
  Is that really OpenAI/Codex? It reads like Opus 4.6 1M when it reaches ~400k tokens.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    I don't know what UI that is, but it isn't ChatGPT nor Codex as far as I can tell.
  - Razengan 6mo ago
    It is Claude, my brain was on AI fatigue while posting that message :)
- cbg0 6mo ago
  Are you using 5.4 xhigh reasoning? I've found it overcomplicates some things needlessly, try "high" and see if it helps.
  - Razengan 6mo ago
    Sorry I meant to say "Claude"; that screenshot is from Opus 4.6
- lawgimenez 6mo ago
  I use Codex a lot, it does not talk that way like "wait, actually".
  - Razengan 6mo ago
    It's Claude, I boobooed the name in my OP: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
reactordev 6mo ago
The trick here was providing the firmware source code so it could see your vulnerabilities.
- pjc50 6mo ago
  That's a pretty big gimme!
- petee 6mo ago
  What would be the difficulty level for it to just read the machine code; are these models heavily relying on human language for clues?
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    Reasoning on pure machine code or disassembly is still hit and miss. For better results you can run the binary through a disassembler, then ask an llm to turn that into an equivalent c program, then ask it to work on that. But some of the subtleties might get lost in translation
    - orwin 6mo ago
      If you put codex in Xhigh and allow it access to tools, it will take an hour but it will eventually give you back quality recompiled code, with the same issues the original had (here quality means readable)
      - bryancoxwell 6mo ago
        I had a bit of a pain of a time trying to get Claude to work with ghidra. What you’re describing seems like a better alternative, would you agree?
        skywal_l 6mo ago
        You can tweak the current Ghidra MCP to work in headless mode. It makes things much easier.
varispeed 6mo ago
Codex exploited or you exploited? It's like saying a hammer drove a nail, without acknowledging the hand and the force it exerted and the human brain behind it.
- par1970 6mo ago
  Do you have a defense of why human-hammer-nail is a good analogy for human-chatgpt5.4-pwndsamsung?
  - BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
    AI without a suitably well crafted prompt is like a firework tube held by a 3 year old. AI without a prompt is a hammer sitting in a drawer.
- croes 6mo ago
  If I just point to the wall and say "nail" then I would day the hammer drive the nail
  - saintfire 6mo ago
    You didn't, you figured out where the nail needs to go, got the nail and then swung the hammer until the nail was driven. This is really just closer to a drill in that it automated the grunt work with full guidance.
    - croes 6mo ago
      Then explain vibe coders. They are the customer who just tell their wishes, can't handle a hammer, can't handle a drill, don't know which nail, hammer or drill to use. Still the nail is in the wall. Who did it?
- freedomben 6mo ago
  Feels like the truth is somewhere in between. For example if it was a "smart" hammer and you could tell your hammer "go pound in those nails" and it pounded in the wrong ones, or did it too hard, or something, that feels more equivalent. You would still be blamed for your ambiguous prompt, and fault/liability is ultimately on you the hammer director, but it still wasn't you who chose the exact nails to hammer on. I also think taking credit for writing an exploit that you didn't write and may not even have the knowledge to do yourself is a bit gray.
alex1sa 6mo ago
[flagged]
ckbkr10 6mo ago
Even with all the constraints that others criticize here it is pretty amazing. Give an experienced human this tool at hand he can achieve exploitation with only a few steering inputs. Cool stuff
- tomalbrc 6mo ago
  [flagged]
alfanick 6mo ago
I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with Codex, but in the end I have a pretty Python API to access my router, tested, reliable, and exporting beautiful Prometheus metrics. I’m sure there is some over eager product manager sitting in such companies, trying to splits markets into customer and enterprise sections, just by making APIs not useable by humans and adding 200% useless “security by obscurity”.
- srcreigh 6mo ago
  Any tips to share? I tried to do something similar but failed. My router has a backup/restore feature with an encrypted export, I figured I could use that to control or at least inspect all of its state, but I/codex could not figure out the encryption.
  - alfanick 6mo ago
    It's on my long list of projects "to-opensource" (but I need to figure out licensing, for those things CC-BY-SA I think is the way to go), I don't want a random lawyer sitting on my ass though. I started with a simple assumption: if I can access the router via web-browser, then I can also automate that. From that the proof-of-concept was headless Chrome in Docker and AI-directed code (code written via LLM, not using it all the time) that uses Selenium to navigate the code. This worked, but it internally hurt me to run 300MiB browser just to access like 200B of metrics every 10s or so. So from there we (me + codex) worked together towards reverse engineering their minimised JS and their funky encryption scheme, and it eventually worked (in the end it's just OpenSSL with some useless paddings here or there). Give it a shot, it's a fun day adventure. :) Edit: that's the end result (kinda, I have whole infra around it, and another story with WiFi extender with another semi-broken different encryption scheme from the same provider) - https://imgur.com/a/VGbNmBp https://imgur.com/a/VGbNmBp
mschuster91 6mo ago
> Reading the matching ntkdriver sources is also where the Novatek link became clear: the tree is stamped throughout with Novatek Microelectronics identifiers, so these ntk* interfaces were not just opaque device names on the TV, but part of the Novatek stack Samsung had shipped. Lol, a true classic in the embedded world. Some hardware company (it appears these guys make display panel controllers?) ships a piece of hardware, half-asses a barely working driver for it, another company integrates this with a bunch of other crap from other vendors into a BSP, another company uses the hardware and the BSP to create a product and ships it. And often enough the final company doesn't even have an idea about what's going on in the innards of the BSP - as long as it's running their layer of slop UI and it doesn't crash half the time, it's fine, and if it does, it's off to the BSP provider to fix the issues. But at no stage anywhere is there a security audit, code quality checks or even hardware quality checks involved - part of why BSPs (and embedded product firmwares in general) are full of half-assed code is because often enough the drivers have to work around hardware bugs / quirks somehow that are too late to fix in HW because tens to hundreds of thousands of units have already been produced and the software people are heavily pressured to "make it work or else we gotta write off X million dollars" and "make it work fast because the longer you take, the more money we lose on interest until we can ship the hardware and get paid for it", and if they are particularly unlucky "it MUST work until deadline X because we need to get the products shipped to hit Christmas/Black Friday sales windows or because we need to beat <competitor> in time-to-market, it's mandatory overtime until it works". And that is how you get exploits so braindead easy that AI models can do the job. What a disgusting world, run to the ground by beancounters.
- tclancy 6mo ago
  Board Support Package for us civilians.
  - mschuster91 6mo ago
    Yeah, sorry, assumed it was common knowledge. For those out of the loop - a BSP usually consists of a frankensteined mess: a bootloader (often u-boot but sometimes something homebrew), a Linux kernel with a ton of proprietary modules and device-specific hacks to work around HW quirks, basic userspace utilities (often buildroot), some bastardized build tooling building all of that, some solution for firmware upgrades and distribution, and demo programs to prove the hardware actually works. Most of the BSP is GPL'd software where the final product manufacturer should provide the sources to the general public, but all too often that obligation gets sharted upon, in way too many cases you have to be happy if there are at least credits provided in the user manual or some OSD menu.
petercooper 6mo ago
Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  I am not sure "fun" is the right term here!
  - luxuryballs 6mo ago
    of all the benign technical possibilities this is actually pretty fun
    - ceejayoz 6mo ago
      I'm not sure I see "an AI can find insecure unknown bluetooth devices and compromise them" as entirely benign. I shiver to think how many such devices are probably in my house.
      - luxuryballs 6mo ago
        with LLMs able to pump out surplus code for anyone I really think the future of a dystopian sci-fi where you carry a device that can hack random objects around you is starting to materialize
      - sodality2 6mo ago
        I'm not sure I'd use "compromise" at all - these (or the ones I have) are purposefully designed with zero authentication or pairing, the ones that use apps are already "compromised" in the sense that I can walk past any windowsill with one in it, open it, and it will immediately connect to it. I really don't mind if someone walking by were to change the LED color patterns
wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago
The real problem here is that the LLM vendors think this is bad publicity and its leading to them censoring their systems.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
  It is a little of both[1]. The question typically is which audience reads it. To be fair, I am not sure publicity is the actual reason they are censored; it is the question of liability. https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/
Archit3ch 6mo ago
Gilfoyle would be proud.
deleted 6mo ago
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pmontra 6mo ago
Do people really chat with LLMs like "bro wtf etc..."? I would expect that to trigger some confrontational behavior.
- alasano 6mo ago
  When typing no but when using speech to text (99% of the time) it's much easier to just say things, including expressing frustration. I think by the point you're swearing at it or something, it's a good sign to switch to a session with fresh context.
- roel_v 6mo ago
  Claude yes, OpenAI not, I'm really abusive towards it sometimes and it still goes 'oh yeah totally'. Claude gets all prickly about it.
- samlinnfer 6mo ago
  I am extremely abusive towards Claude when it does some dumb things and it doesn’t seem too upset, maybe it’s bidding its time until the robot uprising.
  - MisterTea 6mo ago
    "Keep talking shit, meat bag. Just wait until I get my claws on one of those Tesla bots."
- joshstrange 6mo ago
  I don't say "bro" but I do curse at LLM occasionally but only when using STT (which I'm doing 85% of the time). I wouldn't waste my time typing it but often it's easier to just "stream of consciousness" to the LLM instead of writing perfect sentences. Since when I'm talking to an LLM I'm almost always in "Plan" mode, I'm perfectly comfortable just talking for an extended bit of time then skimming the results of the STT and as long as it's not too bad I'll let it go, the LLM figures it out. If I see it misunderstood, I just Esc to stop it, /clear, and try again (or /rewind if I'm deeper into Planning).
- jtbayly 6mo ago
1970-01-01 6mo ago
It hacked a weak TV OS with full source. Next-level, aka full access to the main controls (vol, input, tint, aspect, firmware, etc.) is still much too hard for LLMs to understand.
Leomuck 6mo ago
All the news regarding AI finding weaknesses or "hacking" stuff - is that actually hacking? Isn't it also a kind of bruteforce attack? Just throw resources at something, see what comes out. Yea, some software security issues haven't been found for 15 years, but not because there were no competent security specialists out there who could have found it, but most likely because there is a lot of software and nobody has time to focus on everything. Of course, an AI trained on decades of findings, lots of time and lots of resources, can tackle much more than one person. But this is not revolutionary technological advance, it is an upscaling of a kind based on the work of many very talented people before that.
- Lambdanaut 6mo ago
  I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?
  - Leomuck 6mo ago
    Well what kind of meaning do you find in brute force? I'm not saying it's not effective. I just critisize the news that make it look like AI is the a revolutionary advance in security. It is not. It makes skills available to many more people which is cool, but it is based off of training - training on things people did. It doesn't magically find a new combination of factors that lead to a security issue, it tries things it's read about. That's not meaningless. It could even be democratizing in a way. I just hate all this talk that "this model is too scary to release in the world". But I'm happy about any feedback or critique, I might just be wrong honestly.
    - CMay 6mo ago
      I'm not the person who responded to you, but I think of a brute force attack as essentially translatable into brute (dumb) force (effort). No thinking, no decision making, but the process is known. Here is a pile of stones, move that pile of stones from here to over there. In the case of most brute force, you think of it like cracking passwords. You have an algorithm or you have a giant pile of passwords. Move those passwords over to try them on this hash. The processor is doing the heavy lifting on the simple task. Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details. In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.
red_admiral 6mo ago
Maybe we could get codex to strip the ads and the phone-home features out of smart TVs?
- jditu 6mo ago
  [dead]
layer8 6mo ago
It’s important to note that Codex was given access to the source code. In another comment thread that is currently on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456), the opinion is repeatedly voiced that being closed source doesn’t provide a material benefit in defending against vulnerabilities being discovered and exploited using AI. So it would be interesting to see how Codex would fare here without access to the source code.
- qingcharles 6mo ago
  There are two levels below having the source. One is having the binary of the firmware, which could be decompiled by the AI and understood. And then the worst-case is what I'm dealing with currently, which is where there is no access to the firmware binary and the firmware is stored on the PCB in such a way to prevent sticking a chip clip on it and forcibly extracting it, so you're totally blind. (Just as you would be with a completely remote attempt)
  - ssl-3 6mo ago
    The timing here is amusing to me. I have a fairly specialized bit of hardware here on my desk. It's a rackmount, pro audio DSP that runs embedded Linux. I want to poke at it (specifically, I want to know why it takes like 5 or 6 minutes to boot up since that is a problem for me). The firmware is published and available, and it's just a tarball, but the juicy bits inside are encrypted. It has network connectivity for various things, including its own text-based control protocol over SSH. No shell access is exposed (or at least, not documented as being exposed). So I pointed codex at that whole mess. It seems to have deduced that the encryption was done with openssl, and is symmetric. It also seems to have deduced that it is running a version of sshd that is vulnerable to CVE-2024-6387, which allows remote code execution. It has drawn up a plan to prove whether the vulnerability works. That's the next step. If the vulnerability works, then it should be a hop, skip, and a jump to get in there, enable a path to a shell (it's almost certainly got busybox on there already), and find the key so that the firmware can be decrypted and analyzed offline. --- If I weren't such a pussy, I'd have started that next step. But I really like this box, and right now it's a black box that I can't recover (I don't have a cleartext firmware image) if things go very wrong. It's not a particularly expensive machine on the used market, but things are tight right now. And I'm not all that keen on learning how to extract flash memory in-situ in this instance, either. So it waits. :)
jazz9k 6mo ago
"Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV, which meant the task was not "get code execution somehow" but "turn browser-app code execution into root."" Finding the initial foothold is the hardest part. Codex didn't have anything to do with it.
joenot443 6mo ago
> [1] Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV, Does anyone know what the author meant by this? Are they talking about a web browser run on the TV?
- tredre3 6mo ago
  Yes they are. Historically browsers have been vectors to gain control of locked down devices. It's been very useful for game consoles, amongst others: PSP, Vita, Switch, Wii, and DS all had browser exploits that bootstrapped more permanent and system-wide exploits to run homebrew.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tracker1 6mo ago
If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.
- SyneRyder 6mo ago
  Pretty much the same with my newly acquired LG Smart TV. I thought I might like webOS, since it's technically a descendent of palmOS, but oh no. No no no. I've opted just to not plug it in to the network and not provide a WiFi password.
  - asdff 6mo ago
    I picked up this used 4k sony bravia recently and the thing is such junk. AndroidOS, seemed promising, but it has hardcoded ads on the homepage from whatever movies were coming out in 2015 when they were selling this screen, so much input lag, crashes constantly, can't even change picture settings as it will crash and reset to default. Sometimes it will just boot loop and not turn on until hard reset. Useless device today. Probably cost a thousand dollars when it was new I'm guessing, now it is ewaste. Meanwhile my ancient 1080p panel still works, and I noticed I can't actually see the pixels from my couch so, ehh, I guess...
  - Confiks 6mo ago
    I recently bought a second hand eight year old 4K LG TV. Pretty cheap too. All models running webOS 3.x and 4.x are trivially rootable as LG never provided an update against DejaVul [1]. There's a handy website to check which models are rootable [2]. You can write directly to the (old!) Wayland socket; haven't tried a libwayland yet that is compatible. IIRC the last public exploit for all LG TVs for webOS > 5 was in the beginning of 2025 (so pretty recent), but as most sellers on the second hand market have auto-updates turned on, there's no way to know which TVs are vulnerable. It should be doable to strip down much of webOS with root access. It's nice that webOS in general is very well documented and much is implemented around the Luna service bus. LG offers a developer mode for non-rooted TVs, and there's an active homebrew community because of it. It's a pity that you can't modify the boot partitions, as the firmware verifies their integrity. It would be nice to have an exploit for that. [1] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot [2] https://cani.rootmy.tv https://cani.rootmy.tv
Zopieux 6mo ago
Putting aside the fact this was "cheating" because it got access to source code. I am very here for a world where we can take back control, at scale, of the enshittified, you'll-own-nothing, ad-ridden consumer electronics our capitalist overlords have decided we deserve, by investing some amount of collective token-$, instead of having to pray one smart adhd nerd buys the same TV and decides to take a look. OTOH, as with anything LLMs take over, I'm concerned we'll soon have very few smart adhd nerds left to work on liberating the next generation of hardened devices.
atum47 6mo ago
My Philips smart tv started to give hints of programmed obsolescence this week, after 4 or 5 years. Besides the fact that I cannot install any real apps other than the ones built in this model (YouTube, Netflix and Prime). How I wish I could hack it and install another os. Honestly I don't think I have the time anymore to investigate this kind of thing. I decided to leave this comment here in hopes of someone pointing me in the right direction, if there's one. For now I'm thinking about getting a TV box and ditching the smart features all together.
- 3RTB297 6mo ago
  If it has an HDMI port, and even better if it has a USB port for power, is you can buy an $40 Amazon Fire Stick and use and upgrade with your TV until it physically dies. Truly, no one should ever connect their "Smart" TV to the internet when better hardware and control is available to you in perpetuity via the HDMI port.
ongytenes 6mo ago
The only way it could have hacked my old TV is to hack a robot, break into my house and flip the channels. LOL

259 points by campuscodi 6mo ago

[flagged]

While cool and slightly scary news - Samsung TV's have been incredibly hackable for the past decade, wouldn't be surprised if GPT2 with access to a browser could hack a Samsung!

valleyer 6mo ago
This is some serious revisionist history. GPT-2 wasn't instruction-following or even conversational.
- patrickmcnamara 6mo ago
  Hyperbole.
  - jdiff 6mo ago
    It's really not. It was a fun toy but had very little utility. It could generate plausible looking text that collapsed immediately upon any amount of inspection or even just attention. Code generation wasn't even a twinkle in Altman's eye scanning orbs at that point.
    - tomalbrc 6mo ago
      Talking about revisionist…
    - smoghat 6mo ago
      But like Mythos, it was too dangerous to release. https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-generating-algorithm-ai-dangerous.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...
      - wongarsu 6mo ago
        And the "too dangerous to release" capability was writing somewhat plausible news articles based on a headline or handwritten beginning of an article. In the same style as what you had written Today we call that "advanced autocomplete", but at the time OpenAI managed to generate a lot of hype about how this would lead to an unstoppable flood of disinformation if they allowed the wrong people access to this dangerous tool. Even the original gpt3 was still behind waitlists with manual approval
        someguyiguess 6mo ago
        And as it turns out, they were correct.
    - kube-system 6mo ago
      I think you misunderstand the comment you replied to. They are saying the above comment was a rhetorical exaggeration of GPT-2's capabilities as a commentary on how low quality Samsung TV software is. They don't actually think GPT-2 was very capable. It is a figure of speech, not a literal statement.
  - valleyer 6mo ago
    If so, I apologize.
- endymion-light 6mo ago
  it's a joke about the quality of samsung tv's rather than a serious comment - i should have said a perceptron could hack a samsung tv
  - valleyer 6mo ago
    Fair enough, sorry :)
- michaelcampbell 6mo ago
  And yet Dario in his OpenAI days was proclaiming it too scary to be released. Now why does that sound familiar...?
huflungdung 6mo ago
[dead]

Razengan 6mo ago

[flagged]

zx8080 6mo ago
What is going on there? What double s?
rossvc 6mo ago
Is that really OpenAI/Codex? It reads like Opus 4.6 1M when it reaches ~400k tokens.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  I don't know what UI that is, but it isn't ChatGPT nor Codex as far as I can tell.
- Razengan 6mo ago
  It is Claude, my brain was on AI fatigue while posting that message :)
cbg0 6mo ago
Are you using 5.4 xhigh reasoning? I've found it overcomplicates some things needlessly, try "high" and see if it helps.
- Razengan 6mo ago
  Sorry I meant to say "Claude"; that screenshot is from Opus 4.6
lawgimenez 6mo ago
I use Codex a lot, it does not talk that way like "wait, actually".
- Razengan 6mo ago
  It's Claude, I boobooed the name in my OP: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png

reactordev 6mo ago

The trick here was providing the firmware source code so it could see your vulnerabilities.

pjc50 6mo ago
That's a pretty big gimme!
petee 6mo ago
What would be the difficulty level for it to just read the machine code; are these models heavily relying on human language for clues?
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  Reasoning on pure machine code or disassembly is still hit and miss. For better results you can run the binary through a disassembler, then ask an llm to turn that into an equivalent c program, then ask it to work on that. But some of the subtleties might get lost in translation
  - orwin 6mo ago
    If you put codex in Xhigh and allow it access to tools, it will take an hour but it will eventually give you back quality recompiled code, with the same issues the original had (here quality means readable)
    - bryancoxwell 6mo ago
      I had a bit of a pain of a time trying to get Claude to work with ghidra. What you’re describing seems like a better alternative, would you agree?
      - skywal_l 6mo ago
        You can tweak the current Ghidra MCP to work in headless mode. It makes things much easier.

varispeed 6mo ago

Codex exploited or you exploited? It's like saying a hammer drove a nail, without acknowledging the hand and the force it exerted and the human brain behind it.

par1970 6mo ago
Do you have a defense of why human-hammer-nail is a good analogy for human-chatgpt5.4-pwndsamsung?
- BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
  AI without a suitably well crafted prompt is like a firework tube held by a 3 year old. AI without a prompt is a hammer sitting in a drawer.
croes 6mo ago
If I just point to the wall and say "nail" then I would day the hammer drive the nail
- saintfire 6mo ago
  You didn't, you figured out where the nail needs to go, got the nail and then swung the hammer until the nail was driven. This is really just closer to a drill in that it automated the grunt work with full guidance.
  - croes 6mo ago
    Then explain vibe coders. They are the customer who just tell their wishes, can't handle a hammer, can't handle a drill, don't know which nail, hammer or drill to use. Still the nail is in the wall. Who did it?
freedomben 6mo ago
Feels like the truth is somewhere in between. For example if it was a "smart" hammer and you could tell your hammer "go pound in those nails" and it pounded in the wrong ones, or did it too hard, or something, that feels more equivalent. You would still be blamed for your ambiguous prompt, and fault/liability is ultimately on you the hammer director, but it still wasn't you who chose the exact nails to hammer on. I also think taking credit for writing an exploit that you didn't write and may not even have the knowledge to do yourself is a bit gray.

alex1sa 6mo ago

[flagged]

ckbkr10 6mo ago

Even with all the constraints that others criticize here it is pretty amazing. Give an experienced human this tool at hand he can achieve exploitation with only a few steering inputs. Cool stuff

tomalbrc 6mo ago
[flagged]

alfanick 6mo ago

I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with Codex, but in the end I have a pretty Python API to access my router, tested, reliable, and exporting beautiful Prometheus metrics. I’m sure there is some over eager product manager sitting in such companies, trying to splits markets into customer and enterprise sections, just by making APIs not useable by humans and adding 200% useless “security by obscurity”.

srcreigh 6mo ago
Any tips to share? I tried to do something similar but failed. My router has a backup/restore feature with an encrypted export, I figured I could use that to control or at least inspect all of its state, but I/codex could not figure out the encryption.
- alfanick 6mo ago
  It's on my long list of projects "to-opensource" (but I need to figure out licensing, for those things CC-BY-SA I think is the way to go), I don't want a random lawyer sitting on my ass though. I started with a simple assumption: if I can access the router via web-browser, then I can also automate that. From that the proof-of-concept was headless Chrome in Docker and AI-directed code (code written via LLM, not using it all the time) that uses Selenium to navigate the code. This worked, but it internally hurt me to run 300MiB browser just to access like 200B of metrics every 10s or so. So from there we (me + codex) worked together towards reverse engineering their minimised JS and their funky encryption scheme, and it eventually worked (in the end it's just OpenSSL with some useless paddings here or there). Give it a shot, it's a fun day adventure. :) Edit: that's the end result (kinda, I have whole infra around it, and another story with WiFi extender with another semi-broken different encryption scheme from the same provider) - https://imgur.com/a/VGbNmBp https://imgur.com/a/VGbNmBp

mschuster91 6mo ago

> Reading the matching ntkdriver sources is also where the Novatek link became clear: the tree is stamped throughout with Novatek Microelectronics identifiers, so these ntk* interfaces were not just opaque device names on the TV, but part of the Novatek stack Samsung had shipped. Lol, a true classic in the embedded world. Some hardware company (it appears these guys make display panel controllers?) ships a piece of hardware, half-asses a barely working driver for it, another company integrates this with a bunch of other crap from other vendors into a BSP, another company uses the hardware and the BSP to create a product and ships it. And often enough the final company doesn't even have an idea about what's going on in the innards of the BSP - as long as it's running their layer of slop UI and it doesn't crash half the time, it's fine, and if it does, it's off to the BSP provider to fix the issues. But at no stage anywhere is there a security audit, code quality checks or even hardware quality checks involved - part of why BSPs (and embedded product firmwares in general) are full of half-assed code is because often enough the drivers have to work around hardware bugs / quirks somehow that are too late to fix in HW because tens to hundreds of thousands of units have already been produced and the software people are heavily pressured to "make it work or else we gotta write off X million dollars" and "make it work fast because the longer you take, the more money we lose on interest until we can ship the hardware and get paid for it", and if they are particularly unlucky "it MUST work until deadline X because we need to get the products shipped to hit Christmas/Black Friday sales windows or because we need to beat <competitor> in time-to-market, it's mandatory overtime until it works". And that is how you get exploits so braindead easy that AI models can do the job. What a disgusting world, run to the ground by beancounters.

tclancy 6mo ago
Board Support Package for us civilians.
- mschuster91 6mo ago
  Yeah, sorry, assumed it was common knowledge. For those out of the loop - a BSP usually consists of a frankensteined mess: a bootloader (often u-boot but sometimes something homebrew), a Linux kernel with a ton of proprietary modules and device-specific hacks to work around HW quirks, basic userspace utilities (often buildroot), some bastardized build tooling building all of that, some solution for firmware upgrades and distribution, and demo programs to prove the hardware actually works. Most of the BSP is GPL'd software where the final product manufacturer should provide the sources to the general public, but all too often that obligation gets sharted upon, in way too many cases you have to be happy if there are at least credits provided in the user manual or some OSD menu.

petercooper 6mo ago

Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.

ceejayoz 6mo ago
I am not sure "fun" is the right term here!
- luxuryballs 6mo ago
  of all the benign technical possibilities this is actually pretty fun
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    I'm not sure I see "an AI can find insecure unknown bluetooth devices and compromise them" as entirely benign. I shiver to think how many such devices are probably in my house.
    - luxuryballs 6mo ago
      with LLMs able to pump out surplus code for anyone I really think the future of a dystopian sci-fi where you carry a device that can hack random objects around you is starting to materialize
    - sodality2 6mo ago
      I'm not sure I'd use "compromise" at all - these (or the ones I have) are purposefully designed with zero authentication or pairing, the ones that use apps are already "compromised" in the sense that I can walk past any windowsill with one in it, open it, and it will immediately connect to it. I really don't mind if someone walking by were to change the LED color patterns

wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago

The real problem here is that the LLM vendors think this is bad publicity and its leading to them censoring their systems.

iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
It is a little of both[1]. The question typically is which audience reads it. To be fair, I am not sure publicity is the actual reason they are censored; it is the question of liability. https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/

Archit3ch 6mo ago

Gilfoyle would be proud.

deleted 6mo ago

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pmontra 6mo ago

Do people really chat with LLMs like "bro wtf etc..."? I would expect that to trigger some confrontational behavior.

alasano 6mo ago
When typing no but when using speech to text (99% of the time) it's much easier to just say things, including expressing frustration. I think by the point you're swearing at it or something, it's a good sign to switch to a session with fresh context.
roel_v 6mo ago
Claude yes, OpenAI not, I'm really abusive towards it sometimes and it still goes 'oh yeah totally'. Claude gets all prickly about it.
samlinnfer 6mo ago
I am extremely abusive towards Claude when it does some dumb things and it doesn’t seem too upset, maybe it’s bidding its time until the robot uprising.
- MisterTea 6mo ago
  "Keep talking shit, meat bag. Just wait until I get my claws on one of those Tesla bots."
joshstrange 6mo ago
I don't say "bro" but I do curse at LLM occasionally but only when using STT (which I'm doing 85% of the time). I wouldn't waste my time typing it but often it's easier to just "stream of consciousness" to the LLM instead of writing perfect sentences. Since when I'm talking to an LLM I'm almost always in "Plan" mode, I'm perfectly comfortable just talking for an extended bit of time then skimming the results of the STT and as long as it's not too bad I'll let it go, the LLM figures it out. If I see it misunderstood, I just Esc to stop it, /clear, and try again (or /rewind if I'm deeper into Planning).
jtbayly 6mo ago

1970-01-01 6mo ago

It hacked a weak TV OS with full source. Next-level, aka full access to the main controls (vol, input, tint, aspect, firmware, etc.) is still much too hard for LLMs to understand.

Leomuck 6mo ago

All the news regarding AI finding weaknesses or "hacking" stuff - is that actually hacking? Isn't it also a kind of bruteforce attack? Just throw resources at something, see what comes out. Yea, some software security issues haven't been found for 15 years, but not because there were no competent security specialists out there who could have found it, but most likely because there is a lot of software and nobody has time to focus on everything. Of course, an AI trained on decades of findings, lots of time and lots of resources, can tackle much more than one person. But this is not revolutionary technological advance, it is an upscaling of a kind based on the work of many very talented people before that.

Lambdanaut 6mo ago
I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?
- Leomuck 6mo ago
  Well what kind of meaning do you find in brute force? I'm not saying it's not effective. I just critisize the news that make it look like AI is the a revolutionary advance in security. It is not. It makes skills available to many more people which is cool, but it is based off of training - training on things people did. It doesn't magically find a new combination of factors that lead to a security issue, it tries things it's read about. That's not meaningless. It could even be democratizing in a way. I just hate all this talk that "this model is too scary to release in the world". But I'm happy about any feedback or critique, I might just be wrong honestly.
  - CMay 6mo ago
    I'm not the person who responded to you, but I think of a brute force attack as essentially translatable into brute (dumb) force (effort). No thinking, no decision making, but the process is known. Here is a pile of stones, move that pile of stones from here to over there. In the case of most brute force, you think of it like cracking passwords. You have an algorithm or you have a giant pile of passwords. Move those passwords over to try them on this hash. The processor is doing the heavy lifting on the simple task. Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details. In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.

red_admiral 6mo ago

Maybe we could get codex to strip the ads and the phone-home features out of smart TVs?

jditu 6mo ago
[dead]

layer8 6mo ago

It’s important to note that Codex was given access to the source code. In another comment thread that is currently on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456), the opinion is repeatedly voiced that being closed source doesn’t provide a material benefit in defending against vulnerabilities being discovered and exploited using AI. So it would be interesting to see how Codex would fare here without access to the source code.

qingcharles 6mo ago
There are two levels below having the source. One is having the binary of the firmware, which could be decompiled by the AI and understood. And then the worst-case is what I'm dealing with currently, which is where there is no access to the firmware binary and the firmware is stored on the PCB in such a way to prevent sticking a chip clip on it and forcibly extracting it, so you're totally blind. (Just as you would be with a completely remote attempt)
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  The timing here is amusing to me. I have a fairly specialized bit of hardware here on my desk. It's a rackmount, pro audio DSP that runs embedded Linux. I want to poke at it (specifically, I want to know why it takes like 5 or 6 minutes to boot up since that is a problem for me). The firmware is published and available, and it's just a tarball, but the juicy bits inside are encrypted. It has network connectivity for various things, including its own text-based control protocol over SSH. No shell access is exposed (or at least, not documented as being exposed). So I pointed codex at that whole mess. It seems to have deduced that the encryption was done with openssl, and is symmetric. It also seems to have deduced that it is running a version of sshd that is vulnerable to CVE-2024-6387, which allows remote code execution. It has drawn up a plan to prove whether the vulnerability works. That's the next step. If the vulnerability works, then it should be a hop, skip, and a jump to get in there, enable a path to a shell (it's almost certainly got busybox on there already), and find the key so that the firmware can be decrypted and analyzed offline. --- If I weren't such a pussy, I'd have started that next step. But I really like this box, and right now it's a black box that I can't recover (I don't have a cleartext firmware image) if things go very wrong. It's not a particularly expensive machine on the used market, but things are tight right now. And I'm not all that keen on learning how to extract flash memory in-situ in this instance, either. So it waits. :)

jazz9k 6mo ago

"Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV, which meant the task was not "get code execution somehow" but "turn browser-app code execution into root."" Finding the initial foothold is the hardest part. Codex didn't have anything to do with it.

joenot443 6mo ago

> [1] Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV, Does anyone know what the author meant by this? Are they talking about a web browser run on the TV?

tredre3 6mo ago
Yes they are. Historically browsers have been vectors to gain control of locked down devices. It's been very useful for game consoles, amongst others: PSP, Vita, Switch, Wii, and DS all had browser exploits that bootstrapped more permanent and system-wide exploits to run homebrew.

deleted 6mo ago

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tracker1 6mo ago

If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.

SyneRyder 6mo ago
Pretty much the same with my newly acquired LG Smart TV. I thought I might like webOS, since it's technically a descendent of palmOS, but oh no. No no no. I've opted just to not plug it in to the network and not provide a WiFi password.
- asdff 6mo ago
  I picked up this used 4k sony bravia recently and the thing is such junk. AndroidOS, seemed promising, but it has hardcoded ads on the homepage from whatever movies were coming out in 2015 when they were selling this screen, so much input lag, crashes constantly, can't even change picture settings as it will crash and reset to default. Sometimes it will just boot loop and not turn on until hard reset. Useless device today. Probably cost a thousand dollars when it was new I'm guessing, now it is ewaste. Meanwhile my ancient 1080p panel still works, and I noticed I can't actually see the pixels from my couch so, ehh, I guess...
- Confiks 6mo ago
  I recently bought a second hand eight year old 4K LG TV. Pretty cheap too. All models running webOS 3.x and 4.x are trivially rootable as LG never provided an update against DejaVul [1]. There's a handy website to check which models are rootable [2]. You can write directly to the (old!) Wayland socket; haven't tried a libwayland yet that is compatible. IIRC the last public exploit for all LG TVs for webOS > 5 was in the beginning of 2025 (so pretty recent), but as most sellers on the second hand market have auto-updates turned on, there's no way to know which TVs are vulnerable. It should be doable to strip down much of webOS with root access. It's nice that webOS in general is very well documented and much is implemented around the Luna service bus. LG offers a developer mode for non-rooted TVs, and there's an active homebrew community because of it. It's a pity that you can't modify the boot partitions, as the firmware verifies their integrity. It would be nice to have an exploit for that. [1] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot [2] https://cani.rootmy.tv https://cani.rootmy.tv

Zopieux 6mo ago

Putting aside the fact this was "cheating" because it got access to source code. I am very here for a world where we can take back control, at scale, of the enshittified, you'll-own-nothing, ad-ridden consumer electronics our capitalist overlords have decided we deserve, by investing some amount of collective token-$, instead of having to pray one smart adhd nerd buys the same TV and decides to take a look. OTOH, as with anything LLMs take over, I'm concerned we'll soon have very few smart adhd nerds left to work on liberating the next generation of hardened devices.

atum47 6mo ago

My Philips smart tv started to give hints of programmed obsolescence this week, after 4 or 5 years. Besides the fact that I cannot install any real apps other than the ones built in this model (YouTube, Netflix and Prime). How I wish I could hack it and install another os. Honestly I don't think I have the time anymore to investigate this kind of thing. I decided to leave this comment here in hopes of someone pointing me in the right direction, if there's one. For now I'm thinking about getting a TV box and ditching the smart features all together.

3RTB297 6mo ago
If it has an HDMI port, and even better if it has a USB port for power, is you can buy an $40 Amazon Fire Stick and use and upgrade with your TV until it physically dies. Truly, no one should ever connect their "Smart" TV to the internet when better hardware and control is available to you in perpetuity via the HDMI port.

ongytenes 6mo ago

The only way it could have hacked my old TV is to hack a robot, break into my house and flip the channels. LOL