Source Link Privacy.
Tarlogic Security has detected a backdoor in the ESP32, a microcontroller that enables WiFi and Bluetooth connection and is present in millions of mass-market IoT devices. Exploitation of this backdoor would allow hostile actors to conduct impersonation attacks and permanently infect sensitive devices such as mobile phones, computers, smart locks or medical equipment by bypassing code audit controls.
Update: The ESP32 “backdoor” that wasn’t.
Open source stack will not prevent this. It’s not even a backdoor, it’s functionality that these researches think should be hidden from programmers for whatever reason.
Open source devices would have this functionality readily available for programmers. Look at rtl-sdr, using the words of these researches, it has a “backdoor” where a TV dongle may be used to listen to garage key fobs gasp everyone panic now!
thats a very fair point, I had not seen anyone else make this one But the problem is that in this case, this functionality was entirely undocumented. I dont think it was intended for programmers.
Now if the firmware was open source, people would have gotten to know about this much sooner even if not documented. Also such functionality should ideally be gated somehow through some auth mechanism.
Also just like how the linux kernel allows decades old devices to be at the very least patched for security risks, open firmware would allow users of this chip to patch it themselves for bugs, security issues.
Yeah, of course, it would be better in many ways if the firmware wasn’t closed.