name: inverse class: center, middle, inverse layout: true .header[.floatleft[.teal[Christopher Biggs] — IoT Privacy].floatright[.teal[@unixbigot] .logo[@accelerando_au]]] .footer[.floatleft[.hashtag[SEBCC] Nov 2019]] --- name: dark class: dark layout: true --- layout: true name: callout class: center, middle, italic, bulletul .header[.floatleft[.teal[Christopher Biggs] — IoT Privacy].floatright[.teal[@unixbigot] .logo[@accelerando_au]]] .footer[.floatleft[.hashtag[SEBCC] Nov 2019]] --- layout: true name: toply class: center, toply, italic, bulletul .header[.floatleft[.teal[Christopher Biggs] — IoT Privacy].floatright[.teal[@unixbigot] .logo[@accelerando_au]]] .footer[.floatleft[.hashtag[NetAppBNE] MayApr 2019]] --- layout: true template: callout .header[.floatleft[.teal[Christopher Biggs] — IoT Privacy].floatright[.teal[@unixbigot] .logo[@accelerando_au]]] .footer[.floatleft[.hashtag[NetAppBNE] May 2019]] --- template: inverse # Privacy in the IoT Age ### or, "Alexa, does my bum look big in this?" .bottom.right[ Christopher Biggs, .logo[Accelerando Consulting] <br>@unixbigot .logo[@accelerando_au] ] <!-- Abstract Recapture your privacy in the IoT age Living in the future is great. The gadgets are awesome, the convenience is great, oh, and your life insurance premium just went up because you bought crisps at the supermarket. Have you ever had your home voice assistant randomly burst out laughing? While you weren't even talking to it? While you were getting dressed? While you were enjoying sexytimes? Does that freak you out? This presentation is about some ways to enjoy the benefits of the Internet of Things without spiking the freak-o-meter. Many home automation devices default to "big brother mode", with all its invasions and risks. Did you know that is now cheaper to produce a smart TV than a non-smart TV, because of the value of the data that smart TVs leak? We'll look at how to subvert big brother by making your smart devices work for you and not their corporate creators. --> --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome ] --- class: vtight # Who am I? ## Christopher Biggs — .teal[@unixbigot] — .logo[@accelerando_au] * Brisbane, Australia * Previously: Programmer, Architect, Developer Lead * Convenor, Brisbane Internet Of Things Meetup * Founder, .logo[Accelerando Consulting] * Accelerando is a "full service" consultancy - chips to cloud ??? I founded Accelerando Consulting which helps businesses use technology to reduce stress. Really, that's what I believe, that technology is the gradual process of freeing humanity from drudgery and fear, and I started Accelerando because I wanted to contribute to a future that I will be excited to live in. And that's what I want to talk about today, some ways to realise the benefits of emergingy technology while avoiding a few of the pitfalls. --- # Shameless Self-Promotion ## Brisbane Internet of Things Meetup .tight[ * Evening Symposia, last Monday of each month * Afternoon Workshops, 2nd Saturdays * Visitors and speakers welcome! * Find us on [meetup.com](https://www.meetup.com/Brisbane-Internet-of-Things-IOT-Meetup/) ] ??? But first, some shameless self promotion. Another of my hats is host of the brisbane internet of things interest group. This group offers a learning enivinronment to help you, to help all of us, create a livable future. We meet in Fortitude valley on evening of the last monday of each month. We also do practical workshops, our next one of those is on the afternoon of this coming Sunday 10th. You can find more information on meetup.com --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # The Dream ??? I mentioned creating a livable future. And one of the things I want to do this morning is to give you some perspective on what the internet of things is about. --- # Devices, Communications, Data ## The pillars of the connected future ??? Actually, the very first thing I want to give you is my own personal definition of IoT, and that's this: the internet of things is the fusion of inexpensive embedded devices, pervasive wireless communications, and cloud computation. The IoT promises a future where we can extend our vision and reach as far as we want to go, where each human thrives at the center of their own extracortical web of sensors and agents. --- # But *which* Future? A, or B? .fig50l[ ]] .fig50r[ ] ??? I think a lot about what kind of future I want to live in. On the left we have Star Trek, which says that in the future whenever we want to do anything we have to poke at a screen or command a central computer "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot." In the Star Trek future, the computer becomes an unavoidable presence in our lives. Everything we do is mediated through it. The machines do our bidding, but weirdly we are trapped into doing the bidding, giving orders, making sense of those complicated dashboard displays. On the right we have a still from the 1984 production of Frank Herbert's Dune, directed by David Lynch. A problematic book, and widely regarded as a terrible movie, neverthless it is a spectacularly captivating motion picture to look at. You can turn the sound down if you like. --- template: dark .figfs[ ] ??? The technology in Herbert's future is different. It's everywhere, built in to every object, but aesthetics and comfort come first. In this future they've had their technological singularity and they didn't much like it. They instead navigated a path where technology becomes about augmenting human intelligence, not supplanting it. These stories tell of a very high tech future that LOOKs low tech because form and function are integrated. --- template: dark .fig100[ ] ??? But neither science fiction nor what I'm talking about now are really about the future. SciFi uses the *device* of the future as a lens to examine our predicament and motivations in the present, and that's very much something that we are going to do this morning. --- # My Three Laws of IoT * **First Law:** Devices must cooperate for the benefit of humans * **Second Law:** Devices must communicate, and obey instructions * **Third Law:** Devices must be as simple and reliable as possible ??? So I give you my three laws of IoT * Devices must cooperate for the benefit of humans * Devices must communicate, and obey instructions * Devices must be as simple and reliable as possible If you squint a bit they look like Isaac Asimov's famous three laws of robotics, which he imagined as a minimum constitution that we would need to embed into our technology to prevent it, to put it bluntly, from killing us. And these IoT laws serve the same purpose, which is to prepare the stage for a future where our technology has inherent checks and balances that serve to protect our agency and safety. --- # My Three* Laws of IoT * **Zeroth Law:** Devices must be beautiful (or invisible). * **First Law:** Devices must cooperate for the benefit of humans * **Second Law:** Devices must communicate, and obey instructions * **Third Law:** Devices must be as simple and reliable as possible .footnote[-ish] ??? But Asimov got to retrospectively sneak in in a Zeroth law, so I can too. Devices must be beautiful, or invisible. If we invite computers into our living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms, and even our bodies, they can't look like truck parts, and they definitely need to be working for our benefit, not for somebody else's profit. --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # The Reality ??? Which brings us back to the unglamorous present. We have, as has become distressing apparent, built an internet that feeds on attention and sells it, along with our behaviour and habits to whoever will pay. And it's big business. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product. --- # Profit ## Your TV pays for itself by spying on you .more[[theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172397](https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172397)] ??? In January this year, the CTO of a smart TV company admitted in an interview that if you want to buy a dumb TV without any spyware I mean apps then they're going to have to charge you MORE to offset the loss of all that juicy monetizable data. This is not human centred technology, this is us as the fly in somebody else's web. --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # The Nightmare ??? We have started down the path of being at the mercy of technology, except there isn't even very much hope for mercy. --- # Big Data ## It rhymes with "Big Oil" and "Big Pharma" ??? Do you notice how there's still a whole step at the supermarket checkout, whether human or robot mediated, that badgers you for your loyalty card. They time the toilet breaks of their staff, they aren't spending ten seconds of every checkout pestering you about this so that you can have that flight to bali. --- # Inverse Pokémon Go ## "You have insufficient social credit to ride this bus" .more[[BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186)] ??? But it can get worse. The Chinese government have created a system where your entitlement to government services, and even the right to travel is determined by your behaviour as observed by a pervasive grid of internet and physical surveillance. Here in Australia the junior league fascists who pass for our government think that's a great idea and have legislated themselves frightening powers. --- # The plural of datum is demon ??? We already have robodebt which yanks the social security safetynet out from under the disadvantaged based on less than reliable inferences about our honesty. We already know for a fact that the government is turning its eyes toward uncovering tax liabilties through correlating all the data it already has on our behaviour. We've seen in the last month how phone and travel records can be used to establish who was at a protest, last week in China, this week in Washington, next week in Brisbane. --- # Would you like fries with that? ## Disclaimer: we'll tell your insurer .more[[The Economist](http://www.economist.com/node/21556263), [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/06/15/data-mining-ceo-says-he-pays-for-burgers-in-cash-to-avoid-junk-food-purchases-being-tracked/#43918ffa1d9e)] ??? And then there's the private sector. If supermarkets think they know everything you buy, you bet they're thinking monetising that data by selling it your insurer. And if you buy all your fruit and veg at the farmers market and only the junk food at woolies, what is the insurer going think about your health risks? If you develop diabeties later in life, how would you feel if your health insurance company pulled up the records from your supermarket loyalty card, estimated your lifetime junk food intake, and used this to void your coverage. If you have an automobile crash do your really want your insurance company second guessing whether you ought to have avoided it based on their post facto reading of vehicle sensor data. --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare # Perspective ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # Perspective ??? One solution here is to throw all your devices into a barrel and burn the lot. But I don't think any of us really want to put the genie back in the bottle. Do you remember encyclpedia britannica? Have you used it lately? Besides as a monitor stand, I mean. --- .fig35[ ] .spacedown[ # The unsmart past ## Would you really want to live there? ] .more[[huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973)] ??? Sometimes you get these moments when I realise that we really are living in the future. It's 2019, the year of bladerunner and the running man and Akira. And our world today looks a lot more like those than it does 1985 up there. This is a radio shack advertisement from 1985, and almost every single piece of technology in that advert is extinct now, and what's more, EVERYTHING on that page is now performed by your phone. Its a really hard argument to say that our lives are worse today than in 1985. --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare # Perspective # Gadgets ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # Gadgets ??? Along with the smartphone, the star trek future chameleon gadget that can do anything, the fundamental effect of the internet of things is that we surround ourselves with technology from that other future, where interactivity is built into our homes, our cars, our jewelry and even our bodies. --- # Invisible tech ## Out of sight, but NOT out of mind ??? Invisible technolgy is great, but it makes us feel differently about overt technology. Think about why everyone loves having a phone camera on their person at all times, why we take more photographs than ever before, sales of dedicated cameras have plummeted, yet we reacted with visceral revulsion to the idea of building a camera into our eyewear, as exemplified by google glass. When technology is out of sight it mustn't be out of mind. I want to show some examples of how things can go wrong, in order to expose the questions we need to ask to get it right. --- .fig60[ ] .spacedown[ # The fitbit snitch ] .more[[Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-us-military-reviews-its-rules-as-new-details-of-us-soldiers-and-bases-emerge/2018/01/29/6310d518-050f-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html?utm_term=.ff184fec6e6d)] ??? Here's a story from the middle east last year. This is the outline of a military base in Iraq, showing the fence lines and patrol routes and convoy corridors, assembled from the aggregate fitbit data of US troops stationed in Baghdad. Since almost no locals in countries that have been bombed to a dusty crater by the USA have fitbits, it's easy to identify ones worn by soldiers. What's worse is the US military gave thousands of fitbits out to their own chunky soldiers, without realising they were giving away more than they intended. --- .fig80[  ] ??? And it's not over. Here's a headline from just yesterday. Google has just offered 2.1 billion dollars to purchase fitbit. Or "acquire" as the tech press calls it, as if it was something that you could do casually or by accident. I have a suspicion that 2.1 billion dollars is not something you spend by accident. By the way if anyone wants to give me 2.1 billion dollars I'm more than happy to perform the experiment. But anyway, google like almost all the other trillion dollar tech giants, is now an advertising company inhabiting the hollowed out corpse of a technology company. Yesterday we began to see some alarmed qeries from long time fitbit users asking how can they prevent the data about their movement, their fitness, even their menstrual cycles from becoming grist to google's advertising mill. --- # Information is value ## Who does this enrich? ## Who does this impoverish? ??? The point I want you to make here is that information has immense value, as demonstrated by the lengths and expense that corporations will go to to get it. --- .fig40[ ] .spacedown[ # The statist thermostat ] .more[[NY Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html)] ??? Here's another tale from the united states, where in order to avoid disruption, a manufacturer of IoT thermostats rolled out an update in the middle of the night. If everything went well, almost nobody would notice any problems. Things did not go well. Instead, a huge number of iot thermostats crashed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. So people woke to find their babies crying in freezing rooms, and their heaters unresponsive. --- # Information is power ## Who does this empower? ## Who does this disempower? ??? When technology permeates our lives, so do the attendant risks of failure. Technology can empower, or it can disempower, either deliberately and explicitly, or by implicitly through silently eroding your agency. --- .fig50[ ] .spacedn[ # The unending coprolanche that is IP Cameras ] .more[[Krebs](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/04/p2p-weakness-exposes-millions-of-iot-devices/)] ??? And then we have the effect of what's known as Hanlon's Razor. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. Earlier this year news broke that a huge fraction of the IP cameras on the internet can be pretty trivially taken over by anyone who knows the serial number. Oh and you don't have to know the serial number becuase they're only a letter plus six digits and you can just loop through all the possible numbers until you amass 2 million vulnerable cameras. True story. If you have an IP security camera, talk to me after, or follow that link on the slide. --- # Information is dangerous ## What risks does this technology bring? ## What risks does it eliminate? ??? So the third question we need to ask ourselves when considering a technology is how could it go wrong? What will the effect of this technology be on privacy and safety. How could, for example a hypothetical criminal government, or an unethical vendor, an unscrupulous employer, or even an abusive spouse or a rogue employee use the technology we select against us. --- template: inverse # Taking back control ??? So how do we protect ourselves from these risks, from devices that erode our agency, or leak our privacy, from devices that might go rogue, and devices that are vulnerable to bad actors. . I'm not one of the doomsayers. I'm not in favour of throwing it all in the bin and going back to the benighted and miserable dark ages, you know, the 1990s. But it is true, a lot of the time, that the S in IoT stands for Security, and security, far from being a nerd topic that is solved by hanging out near a coffee shop and kidnapping the first three people you see with humourous t-shirts and bad hygiene, is a philosophical and political issue, as much as technical. But I am going to get technical now and talk about the things that you should do when adopting any technology, and IoT in particular. --- # Trusted infrastructure ??? One of the most fundamental things you can do is reduce your threat surface. Spider silk might be stronger than steel weight for weight, but would you drive across a bridge held up by spiderwebs? I think you intuitively understand that one mis-piloted cessna or a flock of angry birds could bring the whole thing down. And by the inarguable power of a dodgy analogy and vigourous hand waving, I assert that the same is true of the internet of things. Fifty apps connected to fifty low-rent cloud services is a curtain of spiderweb. Doing the same work with a smaller number of professionally built and maintained services is likely to be more secure. Think of it another way, if every time we wanted to send a letter to melbourne we hired someone going that way to hand deliver it end to end, there's more to go wrong than if we hand it to aus post to put on a truck. Okay maybe equating australia post with reliability was pushing an analogy too far. --- # IoT automation hubs ## Apple, Google, Amazon etc. ??? The aus post in our increasingly shaky analogy are the big cloud players, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and their IoT personae Alexa, Siri and friends. Instead of your light bulb running a control line from your front porch, all the way to the cloud, and back down to your phone, which some of them do, your porch light ought to talk to your google home or whatever and then you communicate with your home hub, either by talking to it or using your phone. If you want remote access then you still have it, but there's only one connection to the outside world, not fifty. --- # Open automation hubs ## Mozilla IoT ??? There's a new kid on the block from Mozilla, the makers of firefox. This is a company that's thought a lot about privacy, and so there home automation system is fully autonomous. There's no reliance on cloud servers to make it work. If you want remote access you can still get it but it's not a mandatory feature. They've also proposed an open standard for IoT interoperabiity to the world wide web consortium, in an attempt to end the madness of the walled gardens from those other players. --- # Home automation hubs ## Roll yer own * FOSS home automation hubs (HomeAssistant, OpenHab, et .al.) * [Node-RED](https://nodered.org/) - IoT's Gaffa Tape * [Blynk.io](https://blynk.io/) - The app for your exocortex ??? Really, we're going down the slippery slide here from Apple at the top with no assembly required, to genuine full nerd options. There's a number of building automation frameworks you can install on a computer in your workplace or home, and use to control a fleet of off the shelf devices. The benefit here is that you can start with some of the cheapest, you might say nastiest, devices on the market, the ones that have iffy privacy practices and shaky cloud services, and you bring your own cloud to mitigate most of their drawbacks. Some of them are more friendly than others, and we don't really have time to go any deeper today. --- # Do it yourself ## (because nobody else will do it yourself) ??? I want to touch on a fundamental dichotomy in IoT - you can find devices that do exactly the same job but with wildly varying prices. Let's say you want to monitor your refrigeration temperatures, you can spend two thousand dollars at an industrial supplier, telstra will set you up for under a grand, and don't forget the monthly fee, or you can buy a fifty dollar device straight from a hardware vendor and put together your own infrastructure with some of the money you saved. The people selling those top shelf devices will say you're paying extra for reliability, support and security, but I think you could make the case that what you're doing is putting yourself at the mercy of a vendor, adopting technology for which you have limited or no access under the hood, and taking one of the biggest security risks. --- .fig50[ ] # Node-RED ## Home control panel on your TV, Phone or Wall .more[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJXrN5aq5fY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJXrN5aq5fY)] ??? There are two tools I want to point out, if you want to create your own Iot ecosystem. The first one is called Node-RED and it's your IoT get out of jail free card. Whenever you have two systems that don't quite meet in the middle, node-RED is the duct tape that joins them all up. It knows how to talk to almost every iot device, cloud service and database in the business, and it gives you a visual drag and drop interface that lets you take events from one place and transform them into actions somewhere else. --- .fig50[ ] .spacedown[ # Blynk.io ## Create your own custom IoT app ] ??? The other one is blynk. This is an app that lets you build your own dashboard applications for smartphones. If there's a bunch of things you want to monitor or control but there's no one place to do it all, then blynk lets you build your own. You can even package up your application and roll it out to your staff phones. --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare # Perspective # Gadgets # Cameras ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # Cameras ??? Now cameras, I'm afraid, are a little bit of a shitstorm. --- .fig70[ ] .spacedn[ # "Alexa, Does my bum look big in this?" ## Cameras, .ul[every]where ] ??? Amazon in their unlimited wisdom announced a device about two years ago called the Echo look. And they thought it was a good idea to put this in your wardrobe so you can take a morning selfie. Now morning selfies ARE a thing, and I applaud those with the dedication to carry them off, but this is one of those cases where the risks and consequence of failure far outweighs the total benefit of the product. --- # Mirai ## Shall we play a game? .more[[The Internet of Scary Things](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG49ZVjT67U)] ??? What are those risks? Back in 2016 half the internet was knocked offline by a denial of service attack orchestrated by a new kind of botnet, a network of hundreds of thousands of compromised video cameras. --- # Open Network Video Interface ## ONVIF lets you throw the bundled app in the bin * turn off uPNP * sandbox the cameras * iOS: [Homebridge.io](https://homebridge.io/) adds cameras to home app * [Mozilla IoT](https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/) now supports ONVIF cameras * [Shinobi.video](https://shinobi.video) lets you build your own camera controls .more[[github/unixbigot/onvi-finder](https://github.com/unixbigot/onvi-finder)] --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare # Perspective # Gadgets # Cameras # Hubs ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # Hubs --- .fig70[ ] # Are they listening? ## Sure .more[[https://www.wired.com/2016/12/alexa-and-google-record-your-voice/](https://www.wired.com/2016/12/alexa-and-google-record-your-voice/)] --- .fig50[ ] # Are they recording? ## Probably not .more[[http://bjoernkarmann.dk/project_alias](http://bjoernkarmann.dk/project_alias)] --- .fig50[ ] .spacedn[ # Are the edge cases creepy AF? ## Heck, yeah.] .more[[Kiro7](https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon-device-recorded-private-conversation-sent-it-out-to-random-contact/755507974), [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio)] ??? Except when they are. In Portland a couple in the midst of an argument were called by a concerned colleague who had just received a recording of their argument. And --- # De-creeping a voice hub * Mozilla "Project Things" [iot.mozilla.org](https://iot.mozilla.org) * [mycroft.ai](https://mycroft.ai) - Open source voice assistant * Project Alias [bjoernkarmann.dk/project_alias](http://bjoernkarmann.dk/project_alias) * Just turn off speak-to-activate --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare # Perspective # Gadgets # Cameras # Hubs # Networks ] --- class: center, middle template: inverse # Networks ??? We've looked at things you can do at the device level, now lets look at some general principles you can apply to your whole building. --- # Network risks * .red[Devices that don't employ authentication and/or confidentiality] * .red[Vulnerable cloud services] * Default authentication credentials * Firewall ingress * .red[Malware] ??? Blue = easy, Red = hard --- # Network safety * Separate device wifi ([openwrt](https://openwrt.org)) * Use your guest wifi in a pinch * Turn off or restrict uPNP * [Fingbox](https://www.fing.com) or other network monitor --- layout: true template: callout .crumb[ # Welcome # Dream # Reality # Nightmare # Perspective # Gadgets # Cameras # Hubs # Networks # Coda ] --- .fig30[  ] # Recap .nolm.vtight[ * Choose the future you want to live in * Value your data and privacy * Keep the good parts * Retain local control * Non-creepy voice options * Sandbox high-risk devices ] --- # Resources, Questions ## Related talks - [http://christopher.biggs.id.au/#talks](http://christopher.biggs.id.au/#talks) - Email: .blue[christopher @ biggs.id.au] - Twitter: .blue[@unixbigot] - BNE IoT Meetup: .blue[@iotbne] - Accelerando Consulting - IoT, DevOps, Big Data - .blue[@accelerando_au] https://accelerando.com.au/