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Comment by mystraline

13 hours ago

Repeat after me:

An owner voluntarily downgrading firmware to gain control of your hardware IS NOT A HACK.

And if an adversary is doing this, then they have already breached yoir physical security.

13 comments

mystraline

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_flux  6 hours ago

It clearly seems people have different meanings to the word, then.

For example, if I am able to gain root access to a WiFi access point I own, even though the vendor has tried to prevent it, then yes, I would call it a hack. To me, it doesn't matter why or who is doing the steps.

In fact, I believe I have never before heard someone combine the meaning of the word to be related to the ownership of the device being hacked.

I suspect the number of people understanding the word in your way is a minority. Redefining terms doesn't help build mutual understanding: here we are taking a word some think has negative connotations and then remove the thing they think should be cool and ok, and then suggest that this is actually the real meaning of the word. Personally I don't think this is how words should be wielded.

  • oneshtein  4 hours ago

    > For example, if I am able to gain root access to a WiFi access point I own, even though the vendor has tried to prevent it, then yes, I would call it a hack.

    Yep. The owner of the device can sue you.

wolrah  8 hours ago

This exploit is delivered through the charging cable to the wall box. These wall boxes are sometimes intentionally located in public spaces with the intent of allowing public charging, and Tesla has features specifically for that use case, so that cable is absolutely expected to be plugged in to untrusted vehicles.

abofh  10 hours ago

It's a car the charging port is a viable physical perimeter, letting people inject code at the pump is a risk of design, not user error.

zelon88  8 hours ago

I thought the same thing. How white hat do you have to be to consider ineffective DRM a vulnerability?

kube-system  13 hours ago

Eh, that’s a bad generalization. defense in depth is a thing and there are many cases where you’d want to protect against attackers with physical access

  • zelon88  7 hours ago

    This isn't designed to stop attackers with physical access. This is designed to stop casual tinkerers and shade tree mechanics.

    You know what isn't vulnerable? A "dumb" offline charger. You know what doesn't make any money or turn the consumer into another product? A "dumb" offline charger.

    If it were about physical security, the suggested fix would be to remove the communication from the port entirely.

    Companies shouldn't get to make something simple and secure into something inherently insecure and then iterate security into it. Like drive by wire steering, or brakes. Nobody asked for these things and if you ask ANYONE who works on, builds, or actually enjoys cars the consensus is NOBODY wants it.

    But there are enough sophomoric, pedestrian car owners out there who gawk at the senseless overdeployment of technology and think "this is so convinient" and don't see it as 1) regulatory barrier building and gatekeeping 2) enabling vendor lock in 3) overcoming right to repair legislation. So the knowledgeable and enthusiastic voices of reason who care about cars get drowned out by the hoard of pedestrian geeks who couldn't imagine operating a car without at least a 16 inch touchscreen.

    In security, the best defense is not introducing a vulnerability at all. There is value in having less code. For example, if your PaaS doesn't collect user SSNs... then it can't lose SSNs in a breach.

    The question here should not be "why is this not secure." The question should be "why does this even need to be secure in the first place?" We have a very simple task to do and we've complicated it so much we've introduced vulnerability that didn't exist previously.