The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

https://blog.haschek.at/2019/the-curious-case-of-the-RasPi-in-our-network.html

by BayAreaEscapee • 5 years ago

799 262 5 years ago

blog.haschek.at

JKCalhoun2• 5 years ago

So, not just a Pi-Hole as I immediately first assumed.

2Gkashmiri• 5 years ago

now i guess a smaller pi zero can do this with a much smaller footprint

gambiting2• 5 years ago

Pi Zero doesn't have an ethernet port, so you have the size of the pi+ethernet adapter then.

geek_at2• 5 years ago

Author of the article here. Since I first published this blog post I was getting messages from people asking how it ended.

Sadly it's pretty anticlimactic as the owner of the place had a meeting with the guy who put the Pi there (without me as he didn't want the Pi-dropper to feel ambushed) and in the end decided not to escalate it to legal and just basically told him to pack his things and get out.

So no legal after play and just a slap on the wrist

qngcdvy• 5 years ago

Did you ever find out what it did there exactly? Like, what it collected and what the "gifted person" wanted to do with that data?

edit: Thanks for the write-up btw. Was a nice read, although a bit short (which is the story's fault I guess)

xattt2• 5 years ago

Is “gifted person” code for something? Are they from some sort of enrichment program?

gwd• 5 years ago

So no legal after play and just a slap on the wrist

The problem with this is you have no idea what harm the guy actually may have caused; nor what other RPis he may have set up around the company or around town. Next time he may be more careful with his username, set up the disk to be encrypted w/ a network key, &c, making future exploits more difficult to track down.

discardable_dan• 5 years ago

This, truly, is the thing to worry about: if it happened here, it likely happened at other companies. Turning a blind eye is a blank check to do it again.

fnord123• 5 years ago

There is a case to be made for using the legal system as a deterrent. But there is also the case to made to not do that as in the case of Aaron Swartz.

suifbwish7• 5 years ago

An encrypted disk would be kind of useless in such a device as it would require the user to login every time the device reboots, unless they intend for it to never be rebooted. I’m not sure what you mean by network key in this case.

fortran77• 5 years ago

Are all parents who run "gifted children" blogs scammers of some sort? It sure seems like it.

charles_f• 5 years ago

He did get fired though, not as if he just got his raspberry back and went about whistling happily

makach• 5 years ago

omg, that guy got of the hook easy. he should play the lottery considering how lucky this was.

Chris20483• 5 years ago

told him to pack his things and get out

I though the suspects were an ex-employee, and some guy that didn't work there (the part-owner), so was an actual current employee implicated in the end?

smcl3• 5 years ago

An ex-employee who still had a key to the office so they could move some stuff they had there. Presumably that courtesy was immediately terminated and the key was returned.

pdpi• 5 years ago

My understanding is: ex-employee bought/acquired the device from the "gifted guy"/part-owner, and deployed it in the network cabinet by using the key he still had.

perfopt• 5 years ago

As I was reading this I was hoping for modern day Cuckoo's Egg. But it was not to be.

Great write up. Thanks for sharing.

danesparza• 5 years ago

For anybody wondering, the Cuckoo's Egg (written in 1989 by Cliff Stoll) is a wonderful read about tracking an early hacker. I highly recommend it.

kumarvvr• 5 years ago

Seem pertinent to atleast get an affidavit from the ex-employee detailing what he as done, agree to hold on to the hardware as evidence, put liability on the employee for any time-bombs that might have been stored, ask him explicitly to give in writing all the activities he performed, etc.

Just to have a thread to pull on, in the future, when something might go wrong.

geek_at2• 5 years ago

We did get a hand written statement from him and the original evidence (hardware) is still untouched and locked away.

In his statement he wrote that the pi logged to the SD card but there was no data on the SD card (well not on the data partition) and I'm pretty sure that was a lie and it just logged to Balena.

But even though we could never decipher what the nodejs program actually did (because it was so heavily obfuscated) our internal working theory is that he was tracking the movement data of the boss to avoid him whenever possible.

helsinkiandrew• 5 years ago

Would have been interesting to see what they were doing - nRF52832-MDK doesn't have wifi - perhaps the person was scanning/logging bluetooth devices.

causality0• 5 years ago

Shoot, with the info you got I'd have least called his parents and tattled on him. If you can't put him in jail at least embarrass the shit out of him.

rheophile2• 5 years ago

post the nodejs in a git repo so we can see what he was doing.

cerved• 5 years ago

cat config.json | jq

cries in UUoC

poopsmithe• 5 years ago

Ah damn, I didn't want the story to be over. That was a good read!

pantalaimon• 5 years ago

The nRF52832-MDK has neither WiFi nor RFID capabilities

barbegal• 5 years ago

The chip has 13.56MHz RFID capabilities but obviously needs to be attached to an appropriate antenna which this dongle does not have.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Sure it does! https://wiki.makerdiary.com/nrf52832-mdk/

BlueTemplar4• 5 years ago

Because you can use the 2.4 Ghz chip antenna for anything you want to, including WiFi ?

phnofive• 5 years ago

original discussion, 154 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18919129

can16358p2• 5 years ago

That one really felt like a written-version of a Mr. Robot episode.

Lovely!

smoldesu• 5 years ago

This[0] is probably what you had in mind:

[0] https://youtu.be/XTN_-pRZjoU?t=415

can16358p2• 5 years ago

Yup. Exactly this scene. Thanks for reminding the great memories.

ranma42• 5 years ago

they identified the dongle as a microprocessor, almost as powerful as the Rasberry Pi itself

Well, its more like an order of magnitude slower than the Pi (and with a lot less RAM as well)

A very powerful wifi, bluetooth and RFID reader.

It's 2.4GHz, but only BLE and custom protocols (2 Mbit max, GFSK modulation). The SoC can do RFID, but you have to connect a transmitter coil to use it, which doesn't seem to be the case from the photo.

I'd guess this was just used as a remote control backup connection if LAN is not working?

HeyLaughingBoy2• 5 years ago

That puzzled me too. I didn't remember the 52832 having WiFi, but I figured it was just faulty memory.

I think the dongle might just be Nordic's cheap evaluation board.

cf141q5325• 5 years ago

Maybe a 6lowpan interface for maintenance. This way he could interact with it from inside the room without having to access the closet.

jokoon• 5 years ago

I'm rather curious, why can't the RPi have soldered flash memory? How much would it cost to add 2, 4, or 8GB of flash memory on it? Because I would gladly pay for a Rpi with such memory if it added 10 dollars.

I'm suspecting it would require for them to make a new SOC, breaking compability?

gambiting2• 5 years ago

>Because I would gladly pay for a Rpi with such memory if it added 10 dollars.

That's the problem with the entire RPi ecosystem - there's a lot of things people want "even if it only adds another few dollars". Another ethernet, proper m.2 port, better audio, so-dimm slot etc etc etc....

The Rpi is meant to be cheap. Yes it means that it might not include the feature that you want. And no, "just making it a little bit more expensive" is not the solution here. It's already gotten way too expensive for what is was meant to be originally.

And if you really want a Pi with built in flash, then the compute module has that:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4/?varia...

michaelt2• 5 years ago

Using an SD card means you can reset the Pi to factory settings by swapping the card for another; and undo the reset by swapping the cards back.

This is substantially simpler for beginners than using network boot, or messing around with a bootloader via serial console.

Sebb767• 5 years ago

Additionally, as split root storage setup because the boot partition is small is a lot more complicated than simply buying a 64GB+ sd card and (usually) have no storage problems.

goodpoint3• 5 years ago

Having an 8GB eMMC does not preclude having an SD slot. Any beginner can plug in an auto-installer on the SD card and use the same SD for different devices. Simpler and cheaper.

If that's not enough, the eMMC could even come preinstalled with an OS.

numpad02• 5 years ago

Compute module has eMMC, and they haven’t been excessively costly because of it or reportedly unreliable in the way SDs are. But either way I suspect that the Foundation design team has some issues in designing power circuits rather than that SD cards being unfit or people are throwing in cheap ones.

BlueTemplar4• 5 years ago

Well, that was the issue with older Pis is that they were running powered by (micro) USB 2.0, which officially tops out at 2.5 W. While IIRC the 3rd Pi tended to top out at trying to draw 15 W - SIX TIMES MORE !!! No wonder that SD cards got destroyed in the process !

But AFAIK this shouldn't be an issue any more (assuming a non-counterfeit charger) with USB-C 3.0 (RPi 4+ ?) which starts at 15 W ?

TaylorAlexander• 5 years ago

You can have this today. Raspberry Pi sells the wonderful Compute Module 4 with the normal Pi CPU on it, and it optionally comes with built in EMMC memory. You can plop it on a carrier that gives it a normal raspberry pi form factor. I use the CM4 in my projects and it’s lovely.

Sorry these are two different distributors, but the CM4 is hard to find right now and the PiTray mini is cool, just couldn’t find them at the same place. PiTray mini is also at Digi-Key I think.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Raspberry-Pi-Compute-Module-CM41...

https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2196.html

jpindar• 5 years ago

If your goal is to avoid using an sd card, have you considered a Beaglebone?

tlrobinson• 5 years ago

I'd rather have onboard USB serial. No more trying to find a USB serial cable laying around, or enabling SSH and hunting down the IP address.

It already has the USB port for power, surely they could have gotten Broadcom to include USB serial in the SoC for negligible cost by now?

BlueTemplar4• 5 years ago

Thus tripling the cost of the cheapest Pi - which costs $5.

folmar• 5 years ago

This is a marketing price, if you buy in bulk it costs $15.

mypastself2• 5 years ago

Gripping! Would love to read more articles in this “genre”.

I’m wondering if there was an easy way for the attacker to encrypt or obfuscate some of these configuration files, so that defenders can’t extract settings even when physically connected to the device.

8192kjshad09-• 5 years ago

Some malware will store the executable and all configuration encrypted on the disk and will only decrypt in memory with a key downloaded from the internet.

Ofcourse you can still defeat this if you dump the memory or reverse engineer the process to get the key yourself. Makes it a bit harder but still not impossible.

suifbwish7• 5 years ago

Unless the disk has some way of checking the hash sum of its own file structure before execution, additional debug, logging scripts can be added which load at boot time and record the entire process. It’s a cat and mouse game.

soldeace• 5 years ago

The investigative work in that piece reminds me of this old case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAI8S2houW4

fmajid• 5 years ago

Read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. An oldie but a goldie.

mypastself2• 5 years ago

I’ve owned a copy for a while now. This might just be the push I needed to pick it up.

hinkley3• 5 years ago

There’s a PBS made for TV movie about this story too, don’t know if it can still be found on streaming:

https://imdb.com/title/tt0308449/

mschuster91• 5 years ago

I do wonder when the first "smart SFP" with embedded wi-fi appears - an unlabeled RPi in a junction box raises alarms, but a SFP module that's just a bit longer than the rest? Many would rather assume on first glance that accounting bought some cheaper crap due to delivery chain issues.

(For those OOTL, see https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/smart-sfp-linux-inside - it made the rounds on Twitter and HN a couple days ago)

BlueTemplar4• 5 years ago

OOTL ?

This reminds me of a discussion I've seen... when the Pi first came out I think ? About how we could soon make whole electric kettles or even keyboards (and Pi recently did it !) with whole spying (on wireless) computers built into them, unbeknownst to people not aware of that "extra functionality".

(IIRC with the context of potential Chinese spying ? The current reality is a bit more prosaic : USA can likely just use the backdoors (they likely have) in Intel CPUs (or Windows), and the Chinese - in Huawei's networking gear.)

magicalhippo• 5 years ago

Reminds me of this[1] good old quote from the IRC days

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

[1] http://bash.org/?5273

wink2• 5 years ago

I've also had this problem once, on a university campus though.

"net send <host> 'If you can read this, please call IT SUPPORT at ... and tell us'".

It worked :)

tinus_hn• 5 years ago

This should really only ever happen with wireless connections. You should always be able to tell what switchport a computer is connected to and work from there.

kotaKat• 5 years ago

Did that with a printer that came up on an audit at a hospital once. IT director told me to go to X site to find it based on its IP in the schema and I just cranked out a job to it that said to call my extension. Two minutes later the phone rang...

antongribok• 5 years ago

For a while the easiest and fastest way to identify a 1U server in a rack of 40 was to SSH in and type:

  eject

daveidol• 5 years ago

Ah “net send” - I remember getting a friend in trouble in high school for telling him how to use it.

He sent one to “*” saying something about the FBI or some such, and evidently it ended up reaching computers across the entire local school system (not just our public school).

He was called out of class days later after they looked up the IP and library computer access logs.

barrkel• 5 years ago

This is surely pretty commonplace now, with all the wireless devices we have.

GravitasFailure• 5 years ago

When I first read that back in the day I thought how absurd and improbable it sounded because of how big computers were at the time. Now that raspberry pis and arduinos with wifi are a thing it seems almost inevitable.

xvector• 5 years ago

I was looking at my network today and I realized I didn't know what one of the devices on my network was. I knew its IP, but it had no hostname and a randomized MAC. And for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was, even though I knew which room it was in! (by the AP/signal strength)

I had to use my firewall to monitor the network traffic of the IP to determine what the device was. It turned out to be a long-forgotten smartwatch collecting dust on a charger tucked away somewhere.

TorKlingberg• 5 years ago

It's even worse with virtual machines and containers. Those things can be left over anywhere and still appear as a machine on the network.

EvanKnowles3• 5 years ago

We had a prod case where a server was being flooded with requests, and a downstream server kept falling over. We figured it was an attack of some sort and investigated, eventually traced it back to a computer inside our own network (we're a big computer, five floors of computers).

It had an open file share, containing some Delphi books and from which we got the computer name too. So we walked over to the Delphi team's side, and kept yelling the computer name until some dude said "Hey, that's me!"

Turns out he was running a test-case, in an infinite loop until it worked (because that's how test cases worked), and he thought he was pointed at QA, but he somehow had it set up to target Prod.

Our job was done at that point, we left the rest to management (who made sure he didn't get fired but didn't do it again).

Seattle3503• 5 years ago

I'm surprised employees have sufficient access to prod to make this mistake.

niij• 5 years ago

Doesn't sound like a management failure to me. It sounds like there should be separate vlans for QA/test and Production to prevent this very thing (or potentially something more malicious like the spread of ransomware).

that_guy_iain• 5 years ago

One of the issues with Knights Capital was that they forgot about a server running an old bit of code and shut down all the new ones which just sent all the data to the old server which was causing all the problems. Not keeping track of that server was very expensive.

heelix• 5 years ago

I've had something similar happen to me. I was freaking out that there was something I did not know on my network, as I was going through some router configurations. Searched my office, Bride's office, asked my kid - nothing. Had a pie connected to the back of a TV, drawing power and connected to my network. It bothered me for months that _something_ was there, in my house - that I had completely forgotten was mine. Christmas time rolls around and we try to plug the kid's new console into the wall mounted TV... and there it is taped to the back of the monitor.

cortesoft• 5 years ago

I work for a company with around 50k machines globally... one time we discovered a machine that was supposed to have been decommissioned five years prior still sitting on the network, just waiting to do its job. We ended up scanning our entire IP space and finding 10-20 other machines in the same state.

We now have a process that routinely scans our entire IP space for machines that somehow get lost from our inventory system.

tech-no-logical• 5 years ago

giraffe_lady• 5 years ago

I think the modern version of this is forgetting where a script, cron, lambda or whatever is running from.

I have something that sends me an occasional email. I haven't needed it in years, but it's not in any of the AWS regions I remember ever using. Nor in the obvious places I might have put it playing around with azure or google cloud or whatever. I'm sure I could find it if I really tried but t only emails me once or twice a year so I just let it be.

azalemeth• 5 years ago

That's a very obvious and very obviously bad way of planting a network exploit. Very rookie and rather sad.

In entirely unrelated news, this guide details how to set up an encrypted boot process on a raspberry pi, with it waiting for you(r forked login agent) to ssh in and provide the LUKS password: https://github.com/ViRb3/pi-encrypted-boot-ssh

suifbwish7• 5 years ago

Without reverse ssh wouldn’t you need to be directly on the same network to do so?

ertian• 5 years ago

I was setting up an encrypted-root system with ssh access to pass the passphrase, and got reading. It looks like an initrd image can connect to a VPN or set up a Tor hidden service these days. I didn't try it, though.

egypturnash3• 5 years ago

The whole part with it being tracked back to a site for G/T kids makes it sound like this was a young person somewhere in the range between "script kiddie" and "beginner hacker", so "rookie" sounds about right. Bored teen or twentysomething with time to kill and an interest in computers.

kingcharles• 5 years ago

It was the parent of the child who planted the bug.

juanse• 5 years ago

I would literally read one of these story every day before going to sleep.

I will never have enough. Amazing read!

inshadows• 5 years ago

This article was shared here before and since then I was failing to find it again. Thanks for reposting!

eertami• 5 years ago

And what do we do, when we want to find out a location associated with a wifi name? We go to wigle.net, enter the SSID (=wifi name) and it tells us where on the world it is found.

I've always enjoyed having unique/personal SSIDs, but had never seriously considered this consequence. I wonder what the worlds generic SSIDs are.

jon-wood• 5 years ago

If you're ok with people's devices making attempts at connecting, eduroam, or some variant of Starbuck's Wifi might be good options. There'll be APs broadcasting those SSIDs all over the world.

Hamuko• 5 years ago

"Home" returns quite a lot of results in my area on Wigle.net despite the fact that English isn't an official language here. You can probably pick and choose any generic Wi-Fi router manufacturer name. "Linksys" paints the map pretty well.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 5 years ago

There's a good chance he could have also recovered a MAC from logs etc.

What's more important is that you don't set your SSID to hidden: Someone needs to broadcast the SSID for the connection to work, and if it isn't the AP, it will be your mobile device broadcasting it everywhere you go!

fnord77• 5 years ago

https://wigle.net/stats#ssidstats

CGamesPlay• 5 years ago

Consequence of the generic SSID is that your device will try to connect to any instance of this SSID and re-prompt for a password when it fails to do so.

egypturnash3• 5 years ago

A little browsing around wigle.net brings me to a page listing SSIDs and manufacturers: https://wigle.net/stats#ssidstats

xfinitywifi is the top, with 2% of the routers seen having that name; it's followed by XFINITY (.73%), BTWiFi-with-FON (.38%), linksys (.37%), BTWifi-X (.35%), <no ssid> (.31%). The next one is AndroidAP at .28% and that feels like a good place to stop copying data, go look at the page if you wanna see more of the world's generic SSIDs. Basically "manufacturer name" and "internet provider name" dominate.

greg5green• 5 years ago

This feels like something that's "security by obscurity" vs. "security by obscurity." Would you rather be obscure because you have the same SSID as everyone else so no one guesses which is yours or obscure because you have the same SSID as everyone else and no one knows which is yours, but it's easier to see what is going on inside the network?

One comes with more easily identifying you/your network while the other comes with being more easily hacked by readily available rainbow tables (I think, but am not sure, that WPA3 fixed this, but WPA1/WPA2 use the SSID as a salt for the password)

BXWPU• 5 years ago

Reminds of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeAKTjx_eKA

boringg• 5 years ago

Thanks OP - great read. Seems like a very sloppy network logger - I mean there's a whole raspberry pi for physical evidence! True there are probably a lot of other network hardware so it could hide in plain sight. Either way fascinating that they thought they could get away with it.

mabbo• 5 years ago

While the device itself is sloppy, for many organizations it's probably easier to install and less likely to be detected than a software-based attack.

How frequently does IT run scans of what software is running on the server vs how often does IT physically inspect the server? Remember, one of those things means I have to get up out of this chair and the other does not.

mrtesthah• 5 years ago

You have to wonder why they didn’t rather create a transparent bridge on the network whose traffic they were trying to log; such a device could’ve even been hidden along a network cable.

goodpoint3• 5 years ago

Reminder (from a security guy): what the author did is risky. If you are really worried about a compromised server or a suspicious device call security consultant / forensic experts.

aembleton• 5 years ago

What are the potential risks around what he did?

fatbird• 5 years ago

Malware triggered by its absence? If the device disappears, it's likely because it was found and removed, so malware that starts erasing data or otherwise causing confusion or covering their tracks is a plausible next step (though not a good one in this case, given that the device itself led straight to the person who planted it).

goodpoint3• 5 years ago

- Being suspected or charged of destruction of evidence. It happened.

- Losing access to forensic data by not capturing the contents of the device RAM. Pretty common.

- Becoming witness of a crime and getting personally targeted by some criminal organization in retaliation. This one should be obvious.

- Wasting the opportunity to keep the device on to monitor the activity of the intruder

neilv• 5 years ago

I was a confused by a screenshot in the article, with the caption:

Not the actual site but a similar one

Looks like the article, when speaking of tracing down a wrongdoing suspect, used a screenshot of a Web page of an uninvolved Web site. The screenshot included photos of actual people presumably uninvolved, and a name, phone number, and email address also presumably uninvolved.

While I'd guess this probably reduces Internet vigilantism and accusations of libel (at least involving the actual suspect), I suspect that a journalism professor, editor, or lawyer would advise not to do it that way.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

[...] I got a message from my dad [...] I asked him to unplug it, [...] and to make an image from the SD card [...]

What a technical dad you have!

tlamponi• 5 years ago

What a technical dad you have!

Working for over 35 years for IBM and inspiring BASIC/REXX to ones child may do the trick -> https://blog.haschek.at/about/

tacticaldev• 5 years ago

This story sounds so familiar; did this get posted 3-4 years ago? Good story and good sleuthing tho.

smm11• 5 years ago

Once found a Linksys Wifi router under a desk, the employee was using it to check their Hotmail. I was pretty impressed they knew to switch their network connection to wireless, but it WAS still on our network.

soheil• 5 years ago

I honestly think instead of the username if an email was found and published the author would be receiving so many offers for work from Silicon Valley companies. There aren't that many talented engineers even in SV who could pull something like this off. Sad to see amoral behavior from otherwise smart creative people who're stuck in shitty jobs with shittier bosses.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 5 years ago

Are you serious?

Monitor BLE traffic, filter it to a known device (his boss') and update an IoT server with that information when it changes?

On an RPi, that's not even an afternoon of work. I mean, it's cool and I would definitely want to interview someone who did this, but it's hardly "hire this person now!!!" material.

andygroundwater• 5 years ago

Was working with a NOC technician who was responsible (along with some others) for a pretty large EMEA mobile network, with many millions of subscribers. There was an RFP to update their SMS/MMS system and a certain Israeli company came in to do a site survey, or installation or something in the network data center.

Anyway the long and the short of it was one of their technicians was caught with the previous vendor's SMS-C prized open and some USB device insert into it. Similar response to this, a lot of hollering and hair pulling, but ultimately no contractual or legal implications.

I guess it happens higher up the food chain too.

WelcomeShorty• 5 years ago

PR makes it possible.

I have personally identified more than a handful of employees who'd use their work computers for... let's say "access to inappropriate content". All of them where invited by HR & legal and let go with a more then decent deal.

Absolutely everything was done to prevent the company being associated with anything nasty.

srram• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the time our head of networking came into the lab (early 2000's) asking about why our lab had '70% of the company's total outbound traffic'.

Turns out that one of our sysadmins was running a porn server in the DMZ

anonymousiam3• 5 years ago

Something like this is less likely to be noticed: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/03/the-p...

amelius2• 5 years ago

Same category as those keylogger USB plugs.

kekebo• 5 years ago

As for deobfuscating JS, I've often had good experiences using http://jsnice.org/ ("Statistical renaming, Type inference and Deobfuscation")

teddyh6• 5 years ago

This sounds like one of the classic stories by SecurityMonkey a.k.a. Chief: https://web.archive.org/web/20191006220253/https://it.toolbo...

The individual stories seem to be still available on the non-archived web here: https://www.toolbox.com/user/about/ChiefMonkey/ but not, from what I can find, the convenient story index, which I linked to above.

He seems to have planned a rewrite of all the stories and put them on… Medium.com: https://medium.com/@chiefsecuritymonkey However, the last update is from May, 2020.

amelius2• 5 years ago

Heard a story about some ethernet device cemented into a wall, perhaps on HN. Good luck finding that ...

Jolter• 5 years ago

Once upon a time when Zigbee was the latest hype, a friend worked on a project to cast cheap hygrometer sensors into concrete and have them report via a mesh network. Apparently sensors were predicted to be cheaper than to have an engineer walk the site taking readings to ensure it’s ok to start covering it up.

jve• 5 years ago

What a missed opportunity here. By publishing that obfuscated code, top notch specialists would have untangled it for you just for the sake of satisfying their curiosity. Speedrunning their way until it is crystal clear about what the device purpose was. And completely for free.

The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet (2019)

Related Stories