Comment by cyberpunk
1 day ago
That's really impressive finger pointing.
If the vendor can't even secure their update server; how long do you think it would be until some RCE on these 100k un-patchable routers gets exploited?
The only people to blame for this is the vendor, and they failed on multiple levels here. It's not hard to sign a firmware, or even just fetch checksums from a different site than you serve the files from...
the problem is that these laws just make the problem bigger - instead of having to compromise 100 thousand routers they can just compromise a single update server from a vendor that doesn't care about security.
the fallout is some companies losing their revenue: https://status.neoprotect.net/ and other headaches for people all over the world
But that's already true for most cases and devices. Most people using most devices let auto updates just happen.
And the other option isn't that much better, because "don't do autoupdates because maybe the update server is compromised" leads to a bunch of unsecured devices everywhere.
The only "real" solution is also completely unrealistic: Every private person disables auto updates, then reads the change log, downloads updates manually, and checks them against some checksum.
The better solution would be to simply increase fines until morale improves.
Or the law makes the problem smaller, by making the routers secure, and makes outcomes just, by penalizing the responsible companies.
ok, let's redo this: instead of routers it's an IoT device. The router protects the IoT device from direct access so it is secure from majority of attack vectors - now an IoT device provider gets their server compromised and hundreds of thousands of IoT devices are now bots in a botnet due to the ability to forcefully push a security update.
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