Comment by amstan
8 hours ago
On the other hand, my local qwen model (3.8-flash-next) was trying to convince me that the eMudhra CA thing is no big deal since you need to be "positioned correctly" (eg: any wifi network) to be able to MITM, and most of the IOT devices would have patched stuff by now.
The CA thing is bad, but in practice a lot more high effort to exploit. As a prerequisite the attacker has to be present on the same network, which makes any individual attack a lot more high effort. In contrast for something like PHP2Shell (if exploitable) any PHP instance exposed on the internet can be attacked by anyone from anywhere.
With a MITM, you also mainly breach confidentiality, but this doesn't directly give you an exploit chain to pwn the device (though the many auto-updaters people are using nowadays might be one).
For IOT devices, there are also factors that limit the exposure. The certs are only from 2025/2026, so few devices with them installed are likely present in any given home, and depending on the hardware footprint devices may only come with the few select CAs bundled that they require due to size constraints anyways.
Ah yes, IoT devices, known for their rock solid security
sounds like you quantized it a bit too hard