Comment by bahaaador
9 days ago
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I had thought about this as well but came to the conclusion that from the company's perspective, this is no different than connecting a random keyboard bought from Amazon, what do you think?
Another thought around this is that I don't even think there's anything intrinsically insecure about BT as an attack vector but most likely some old policy based on security issues that existed in the early days of Bluetooth. Or at least I don't know of any, but I'm no expert in this so I would love to hear other people's insights here.
Secure bluetooth requires manufacturers to get the cryptography right. Even big brands like Logitech have gotten that wrong in recent memory, allowing attackers both to decrypt what you type [1] and to inject keystrokes [2]. And these are long-lived devices, even if vulnerabilities get patched in newer devices there are still plenty of 5 year old or older mice and keyboards with outdated firmware floating around. Not to mention the possibility of 0-days known to your attacker.
Wired connections are inherently more difficult to attack. In security critical applications banning bluetooth is perfectly reasonable.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRJ7i2J_Y80
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EksyCO0DzYs
Same with keyboards and mouses which use insecure usb radio receivers. This company policy doesn't really prevent that.
The best way to correctly fight Shadow IT is to provide equipment and services so good nobody would even care using something else.
I'm always a proponent of just spending some money on your office equipment. Even a $90 mouse and $200 keyboard costs less than a tenth of a percent of salary of an average office worker, never mind developer (amortized over a very conservative 5 year lifespan). Give people the option to choose between 2-3 sanctioned models, throw in some vertical mice and split keyboard options and you can even brag about how much you care about your employees' health.
Some people will always want to bring their own equipment, but a lot of it is caused by penny pinching or lack of options
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But what they offer is crap, I like that my company let's me change the equipment
In my experience, the IT section didn't trust anything they didn't approve, themselves. They certainly wouldn't allow us to buy any random device from Amazon.
It sucked. Big time, but they had the clout.
In my experience, I just never asked for permission when I was going to work around an annoying policy. I think while the company IT department will not love you, as long as you don't show up in one of their dashboards, it's pretty unlikely they will care. For years. Even if someone does bug you, I doubt it will amount to much other than being forced to adhere to the policy. As long as you ensure it doesn't look too much like you did it on purpose. (I would at least recommend a nice case for the device and picking innocuous USB IDs. Might be able to make it seem like a reasonable looking product, like a normal wireless keyboard receiver.)
Remote work at startups has largely removed my need for this kind of behavior. Now I'm mostly just mad that I can't always run Linux at work anymore.
> In my experience, I just never asked for permission when I was going to work around an annoying policy.
Same here, though I've never been in a significantly restrictive place with no authority (in current long-term DayJob I have some involvement in decisions wrt what restrictions are appropriate, and what exceptions to them are appropriate).
If someone is in a truly restrictive environment, they should take care. A deliberate breach of policy could be a job terminating excuse, or at least further justification, if someone wants them out of the way for any other reason, and in such circumstances a workaround and a breach will be seen in the same light.
The irony of it is that these types love to then support software and hardware that is full of vulnerabilities. "Oh, our management software/SSL-VPN has just been pwned for the sixth time in two years? Well at least the vendor has a fix and the security team can deal with the problem!" or "well our infrastructure is so poorly managed that a single Bluetooth device could, in fact, take over the whole company!"