This is pure laziness aka “reduced time to market” on the part of Flock.
It takes time and effort to think through proper secure boot architecture and to implement key management in a way that doesn’t kill developer productivity.
Their product managers, though, should have realized that setting these up in unsecured public spaces means that their threat model really does include local physical access to everything.
Using off the shelf hardware and software stacks all but guarantees attackers have tools at their fingertips to exploit said physical access.
Given all the recent exploits hitting the kernel, there’s a good chance that there exists an exploitable over-the-air vulnerability present in their WiFi/bluetooth stack, too.
They want the good, bad and ugly to flock to them as it were and vaporize them so Axon and Motorola Solutions can just pick up right where they left off. And people will just ignore or forget it because it's not the same company.
killbot5000 · · focus · HN ↗
It takes time and effort to think through proper secure boot architecture and to implement key management in a way that doesn’t kill developer productivity.
Their product managers, though, should have realized that setting these up in unsecured public spaces means that their threat model really does include local physical access to everything.
Using off the shelf hardware and software stacks all but guarantees attackers have tools at their fingertips to exploit said physical access.
Given all the recent exploits hitting the kernel, there’s a good chance that there exists an exploitable over-the-air vulnerability present in their WiFi/bluetooth stack, too.
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
MattDaEskimo · · focus · HN ↗
darksim905 · · focus · HN ↗