Wanted to spy on my dog, ended up spying on TP-Link

The device should ideally have some kind of secret material derived per device, like a passphrase generated from an MCU serial number or provisioned into EEPROM and printed on a label on the device.

Some form of "enter the code on the device" or "scan the QR code on the device" could then mutually authenticate the app using proof-of-presence rather than hardcoded passwords. This can still be done completely offline with no "cloud" or other access, or "lock in"; the app just uses the device secret to authenticate with the device locally. Then the user can set a raw RTSP password if desired.

This way unprovisioned devices are not nearly as vulnerable to network-level attacks. I agree that this is Not Awful but it's also Not Good. Right now, if you buy this camera and plug it into a network and _forget_ to set it up, it's a sitting duck for the time window between network connection and setup.

AT&T routers, for example, ship like this. There's a wifi network and a wifi password printed onto the device.

But that also means then that often anyone with physical access can easily get into the device. The complicated password provides an additional layer of illusion of security, because people then figure "it's not a default admin password, it should be good". The fundamental problem seems to be "many people are bad at passwords and onboarding flows", and so trying variations on shipping passwords seem to result in mostly the same problems.

If you buy the camera, plug it in, and forget to set it up, you just flat out can't use it right? I agree that proof of presence is way better but how many people are seriously going to be affected?

No, if you buy the camera, plug it in, and forget to set it up, then someone can use the default password and key material stored in the app to pretend to be the app and provision it on your behalf.

That's the only real vulnerability here, and it's no big deal, but it is A Thing and there is definitely a better way to do this that doesn't lose the freedom of full-offline.

If you have physical access you can just factory reset the device and onboard it with the normal flow though

Ok yeah I think we're in agreement then.

Same with Orange branded ones. There is even a QR code that you can scan on your phone - no more typing 16-24 hex characters.

It's hard to decide whether it's good or bad. It is definitely easier. Which I guess matters most in consumer grade routers.

I agree that would be nice, but it also doesn't sound all that practical for a small vendor.

I used to sell a home networking device,[0] and I wouldn't do what you're describing. If there were an issue where the labels calculate the wrong password or the manufacturer screws up which device gets which label, you don't find out until months later when they're in customer hands and they start complaining, and now you have to unwind your manufacturing and fulfillment pipeline to get back all the devices you've shipped.

All that to protect against what attack? One where there's malicious software on the user's network that changes the device password before the user can? In that case, the user would just not use the camera because they can't access the feed.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

TP-Link is far from being a small vendor, though.

Ah, I see. I thought OP used TP-Link for their router. I missed that Tapo (the camera manufacturer) is a subsidiary of TP-Link.

That's fair, though at least resetting would indicate that an attack happened. Default passwords and printed passwords can result in undetected attacks, which are arguably worse.

I think he has it backwards: Easy for a small vendor, very hard for a large one.

Ha! I actually use TinyPilot all the time, nice!

> I agree that would be nice, but it also doesn't sound all that practical for a small vendor.

Personalizing / customizing per device always introduces a huge amount of complexity (and thus cost). However, this is TP-Link we're talking about, who definitely have the ability to personalize credentials at scale on other product lines.

And again, to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that the current way is some horrible disaster from TP-Link, just advocating for a better solution where possible. I think the current system reads as fine, honestly, it sounds like typical cobbled together hardware vendor junk that probably has some huge amount of "real" vulnerability in it too, but this particular bit of the architecture doesn't offend me badly.

> now you have to unwind your manufacturing and fulfillment pipeline to get back all the devices you've shipped.

This can be avoided with some other type of proof-of-presence side channel which doesn't rely on manufacturing personalization - for example, a physical side-channel like "hold button to enable some PKI-based backup pairing or firmware update mode." For a camera, there should probably be an option to make this go away once provisioning is successful, since you don't want an attacker performing an evil maid attack on the device, but for pre-provisioning, it's a good option.

I feel seen. Why is the security illusory? I still don't understand the problem with this. Is the concern that someone will break into my house to covertly get access to my wifi password?

Slight tangent: I just read your Tiny Pilot blog post, which was interesting and worthwhile. Thanks for sharing that!

These may be illegal in some jurisdictions due to accessibility laws, and are a bad idea in general, for these reasons as well as unattended configuration scenarios.

> The device should ideally have some kind of secret material derived per device, like a passphrase generated from an MCU serial number or provisioned into EEPROM and printed on a label on the device.

It is better than simple secret like 12345678 but it can go wrong too, like in the case of UPC UBEE routers where the list of potential passwords can be narrowed down to like ~60 possibilities using a googled generator [1] whilst knowing only the SSID.

It did require firmware reverse engineering to figure out [2][3] but applies to most devices I've encountered. User should ideally always change the default password regardless.

[1] https://upcwifikeys.com/UPC1236567

[2] https://deadcode.me/blog/2016/07/01/UPC-UBEE-EVW3226-WPA2-Re...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20161127232750/http://haxx.in/up...

It doesn't change anything in this case though, you can't use the default password against a tp-link device after it's been onboarded.

> The device should ideally have some kind of secret material derived per device

Thats the wrong way to do it, just require the user create a secret on first boot, and have factory reset functionality for when you forget it.

> Personalizing / customizing per device always introduces a huge amount of complexity (and thus cost)

For a hardware product mass produced like this, they should already have a custom label that has the unique serial number on it which is also programmed into each device, so they should already have the infrastructure to do that (potentially as part of automated board testing/flashing).

Adding a randomly generated password is hardly more work once you have the ability to do that.

For a large manufacturer, it can be flashed onto the device automatically by a machine as part of the production line. That's not easy to set up, but basically something they already need to have set up (you don't want to have humans have to plug in boards to flash firmware and load serial numbers, etc. on to every unit).

There could be another scenario. I assume that factory resetting the camera will bring back the default password. Factory reset is a long press on the power button (in some cheap TPlink camera), so in theory someone with physical access can take control over the camera without you noticing until you try and use it.

Well it was "the cheapest cam in Amazon" according to the article so my expectations were that this would not be "ideal".