[Cryptography] Business opportunities in crypto

[Henry Baker]

At 10:01 AM 4/16/2021, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 12:10 PM Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
>On 4/16/21 7:08 AM, Henry Baker wrote:
>>Re: In wifi terms it sounds like a temporary SSID that is communicated out-of-band. 
>>This is precisely what I'd like to avoid.
>>
>>If I have a point2point connection within my house, there should be no 'SSID' -- temporary or not -- broadcast that is 'visible' outside the house.
>
>If you are doing this on wifi, assume something is receivable outside the house. Whether it is visible as an arbitrary SID ("orange-couple-sonic", "inside-mustang-iris"
) or is invisible—until some sniffer software is updated to displaay a description of observed point2point connections—seems a fine point: Radio signals will be observable.
>
>Which makes me again wonder what problem is being solved. What are use cases? There will be a lot of traffic analysis risks, do you really hope to hide that a rendezvous has happened at all? (That's hard.) What do you expect to be learnable and what not?

Re: What are the use cases (for wireless p2p wired-replacement connections) ?

Fair enough question.

The truth is that there are *more* use cases for p2p wired-replacement than there are for multipoint connections.

All of your 'wireless window-open/window-break' detectors have to communicate with some alarm device; it is insane for an alarm system to 'publish' an SSID which can be hacked 24/7 by a battery-powered Raspberry Pi device left in a tree in your yard.

You want a 'wireless' HDMI connector to your fancy new big-screen TV; the only reason why these wireless HDMI connections are even remotely private is due to the DRM requirements of the big content holders; they don't give a ***t for their customers' privacy, however.

Have you ever looked at the number of *printers* displaying their SSID's in any given business neighborhood? While a 'shared' printer is definitely a use case for printers, I doubt that most people realize how easy it is to hack such a printer to get into that business's network. I'd be happy to add a USB hub to my printer to plug in the 4-5 dongles that might want to talk to the printer if such dongles provided more security and privacy.

---
Security of home wireless devices is going to be a huuuge problem in the near future.

How hard is it to jam or spoof the ridiculously cheap window-closed/window-break detectors?

How hard is it for someone to park their car in front of your house for 48 hours and pound on all of your network SSID's 24/7 ? (Oh, wait, it's actually been done before from the parking lots of stores.)

When was the last time you updated your wifi router SW again? Your 'smart TV' SW? Your printer SW? Your 'smart' XXX (fridge, dishwasher, lightbulb, thermostat, Alexa/HelloGoogle speakers, etc.).

The wonderful thing about p2p devices is that they *don't* have to advertise, so they're much more difficult to target. All someone sees from outside your house is that there are a lot of devices talking in a lot of locations around the house, but there's no SSID's, no MAC's, no *addresses* being broadcast, so there's nothing the outside hacker can point his hacking tools at.

The best the outside hacker can do is to *jam* as much of your house as possible.

It turns out that with sufficiently low bit-rates, even low-power devices can overcome gigantic jamming power, because the jammer can't simultaneously hit all of the frequencies without also jamming all of the neighbors for miles around. An actively jammed device can still get out a 'SOS'/'911'/help signal by falling back to a much lower bit rate.

But any decent alarm system will treat a non-responding window-closed/window-break detector as if there were an active intrusion going on *right now*, and set off the alarm, call the alarm company, and call the police.

---
But it isn't just houses. If you have a pool with pool equipment; an external pump; external lights; etc., etc.

What about large vehicles? The large number of wires -- even with multiplexing -- are becoming a major cost, weight and recycling issue.

Many of these signals will eventually be carried wirelessly -- not just the Bluetooth connection between your phone and your car.