aeronautic

7 ms·

1.
Transparent Spot Instances(dev.to)
1 points by aeronautic 8y ago|0 comments
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Agree. While I love rust and think it (should) replace C for web servers and the like, the majority of the issues with IOT devices are just basic security oversights and design errors. You raise some very good points: 1. Secure by default s
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Very good point. Even requiring the user to specify a maintenance window can ruin the experience. Some patches should be able to be made "hot", but that takes extra ram which is often squeezed to a premium in a device. I would rec
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Still true when I tested last year. The core protocol does not have a defined way to get the browser to forget the login. You have to resort to different fudges on different browser. Net/Net: the http auth ui sucks, has bad usability,
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by aeronautic 9y ago
True point. The difference is that enterprise apps understand the need to patch and update. IOT devices and device builders largely do not. IOT devices today look pretty much like any other internet device too. Linux, good CPU horsepower, a
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Love it.
7.
by aeronautic 9y ago
I know! Why do device manufacturers need to be pushed for this? We consumers keep buying stuff that has been put on the internet with little to no thought about security today or tomorrow. IOT will get much worse before it gets better. I s
8.
by aeronautic 9y ago
If the device does not listen, i.e. it calls out, then it is inherently much more secure. However, many devices use an embedded web server and do listen for requests. If the device does not listen, and polls regularly for updates, then that
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Do you mean basic & digest http auth built into the browsers? If so, yes, they are bad. The issue is you cannot reliably implement log off on all browsers.
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by aeronautic 9y ago
I know, it is a very sad state of affairs. In doing IOT for 2 decades, this is probably one of the biggest issues. At best, most devices have a "download firmware" option that 99% of users can't operate. I could go on about d
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IOT Developer Security Checklist(simplesecurity.sensedeep.com)
70 points by aeronautic 9y ago|34 comments
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Thanks everyone for some great comments and discussion. Really appreciate your time and feedback on the article. I'll fold in the feedback and the ideas and go forward with it. Thanks all OP: Michael O'Brien
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by aeronautic 9y ago
No argument on that (except the horseshit ;-)
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Coding is easy, writing is just darn hard!! Thanks for the ideas. I'll check those out.
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Sorry that is not quite what was intended. I've revised the text to say: If your database supports low cost encryption at rest (like AWS Aurora), then enable that to secure data on disk. Make sure all backups are stored encrypted as we
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by aeronautic 9y ago
I agree with you, but I understand his wish though. Security sometimes is just hard and it is unrealistic to hope that all developers, everywhere, all the time will get it right. The more the platform can do, the better.
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by aeronautic 9y ago
As the author, I should clarify that I am a developer - full time and have been for years. If my english seems to imply a lack of depth of understanding - I'm sorry. The purpose of the checklist is to get people thinking about items th
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Try this to get you started: https://www.troyhunt.com/understanding-csp-the-video-tutoria...
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Thanks for your well structured comments. The purpose of the checklist was to get people to think. It is really hard to do much more without going very long. A number of people have suggested that I link implementation background off each i
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by aeronautic 9y ago
I think we can all agree that developers can get better educated about security and can participate building security into the product from the very start. It is hard to engineer security in via a sec-team at a later stage. Education is the
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by aeronautic 9y ago
That is right. The key point is to reduce exposure to SQL injection by not formatting queries. Prepared statements help solve a whole class of bugs at a lower level.
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by aeronautic 9y ago
I'd recommend you start with the items at the very end of the check list. Make a list of the threats and plan who you need to defend against. That will then allow you to cull the list down.
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by aeronautic 9y ago
I'm not sure I fully understand what you are saying. Can you elaborate.
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Nicely said. The one mod I'd suggest is: If someone has gained access to the passwords and has not used the password yet or was not interesting in directly using the password themselves, but rather, they on sold it. There is a window o
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Sorry, I should be clearer (late here). With time passing, the chance of you or anyone with access to the password being socially engineered, or some other human error, or a hack on your PC desktop systems, increases linearly with time. The
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by aeronautic 9y ago
No, we don't encrypt indiscriminately. We selectively pick fields to encrypt - fields that are highly sensitive. And you are right, we do this because an ops error can easily make a mistake sometime in the future and probably will one
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Are you sure the objects remain leaked when a connection disconnect comes through? I don't have hard data on that. Depending on the node web framework (express, ...) they may handle that differently and may have timeouts to cleanup. I
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Both. You want to choose a good password and then not let it get too stale. A very old password (say 1 year) has a higher chance of being subverted purely because there is more elapsed time wherein attackers could have gained access. Choose
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Yes, we're not protecting against the app being attacked, the key being jacked and then the attacker getting access to the db. Rather, we're protecting the database against being accessed directly. That could happen due to an erro
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by aeronautic 9y ago
Password hashes are handled separately using bcrypt - another story. For the User.email field, we crypt/decrypt in the ORM/DB layer. So we search with the encrypted value that is stored in the db. App code provides plain-text emai

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