This is a very neat and approachable write-up, but is the final result really a hack? If I understand correctly, you're getting an unprivileged shell on a device you own and have paired with your smartphone; more or less equivalent to installing a terminal emulator on your smartphone, except it's smart glasses in this case.
Should the ability to own one's devices really be treated as a vulnerability and reported to security teams?
"hack" on hackernews essentially means "I used my computer to do something". The overwhelming population of people here aren't security engineers, but rather developers.
How is it not a hack to do something on a device that doesn't let you do it? Yes, the device should let you do whatever you want, but it doesn't, therefore this is a hack.
I'm going to try it on my glasses, and disable autoupdating ASAP.
I understand having a locked-down version of mass-produced tech that is for the general consumer. However, I also firmly believe that anyone who wants to should be able to bypass that. Make it void the warranty, don't allow customer support, whatever you want. But make it a free option to have complete control. If I buy a piece of hardware, I should own it.
(I say this as I am currently charging a cheap doorbell camera I bought, so that I can start dumping data from it and reverse engineer its protocol, solely so that I can lock it down to my local network...We needed something at the time, or I would have bought something more expensive that had an open protocol...)
This is a very neat and approachable write-up, but is the final result really a hack? If I understand correctly, you're getting an unprivileged shell on a device you own and have paired with your smartphone; more or less equivalent to installing a terminal emulator on your smartphone, except it's smart glasses in this case.
Should the ability to own one's devices really be treated as a vulnerability and reported to security teams?
"hack" on hackernews essentially means "I used my computer to do something". The overwhelming population of people here aren't security engineers, but rather developers.
I considered that, but the mentions of pwn2own and the bug bounty program have me thinking "hack" is used in the security/mainstream sense.
How is it not a hack to do something on a device that doesn't let you do it? Yes, the device should let you do whatever you want, but it doesn't, therefore this is a hack.
I'm going to try it on my glasses, and disable autoupdating ASAP.
It's really sad that getting a shell on a device you own is now considered a vulnerability.
I understand having a locked-down version of mass-produced tech that is for the general consumer. However, I also firmly believe that anyone who wants to should be able to bypass that. Make it void the warranty, don't allow customer support, whatever you want. But make it a free option to have complete control. If I buy a piece of hardware, I should own it.
(I say this as I am currently charging a cheap doorbell camera I bought, so that I can start dumping data from it and reverse engineer its protocol, solely so that I can lock it down to my local network...We needed something at the time, or I would have bought something more expensive that had an open protocol...)
(dupe) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50406224
Nice. How robust is this with software upgrades though? Also looks like arbitrary code execution in the app sandbox, so no persistance?