Internet of Things and Games talk by Jesse Schell at DICE conference February 2010

This is a funny and though provoking talk by a smart game designer Jesse Schell about using games and point chasing with the ubiquitous sensor future of the 'Internet of Things'. Two key points he makes. First, humans love to compete in games. And second, the connected world of much of what we touch and do during the day is going to have sensors attached that will report our actions to someone. It is coming, as he says there is no doubt about that.

Sony PS3 hacked: ""I rigged an FPGA button to send the pulse. Sometimes it kernel panics, "

The Register is reporting that a very smart hacker has been able to open up the Sony PS3. What is interesting here is what appears to be his combination of a hardware, software, old school 'keep pounding on the door till you get in' solution.


"I rigged an FPGA button to send the pulse. Sometimes it kernel panics, sometimes it lv1 panics, but sometimes you get the exploit!! If the module exits, you are now exploited."

With the increase of open source hardware debuggers coming available, the 'old' clip of the young John Conner in the movie Terminator 2 sticking his 'hacked' ATM card into the ATM machine and getting money is here.

RFID passport privacy issues uncovered: A Traceability Attack Against e-Passports

This paper by Tom Chothia and Vitaliy Smirnov at the University of Birmingham shows another example of why open source vetting and more transparency are necessary before massive Internet of Things systems are rolled out.

Their conclusion:
'Our work shows the inherent dangers of using RFID tags in personal items.'

Berg Insights research: 1.4% of world wide wireless connection are machine to machine (M2M)

The research firm, Berg Insights, did a study at the end of last year  that finds that 1.4 percent of wireless communications is from one machine to another. And this is predicted grow by 26% per year. In the USA, Berg says the current percentage of wireless M2M connections is 4.3%.

This is the 'Internet of Things' growing at a very fast pace. This research only focuses on the mobile/cellular market, so the machine to machine communications in other frequencies [WiFi, Zigbee, Dash7] are even larger.

From Berg's research paper:

New M2M initiatives launched by major mobile operator groups are expected to have a positive influence on demand, stimulating new large-scale projects. Regulatory developments are predicted to have a major impact on the telematics industry. The EU is expected to propose formal legislation for the introduction of eCall by 2014 but in Brazil the fate of Resolution 245 is more uncertain. Another significant development to watch will be the progress of the Dutch government’s plans to introduce a nationwide electronic road charging system for all motor vehicles.

More on bad embedded software coding and coding practices

Good article here in Electronic Design about litigation that is starting to occur around embedded systems code. Just have a look at this line of code the author of that article found:

y = (x + 305) / 146097 * 400 + (x + 305) % 146097 / 36524 * 100 + (x + 305) % 146097 % 36524 / 1461 * 4 + (x + 305) % 146097 % 36524 % 1461 / 365;

In the original listing, there were no comments on this line to help. I eventually learned that this code computes the year, accounting for extra days in leap years, when given the number of days since a known reference date. But we still don’t know if it works in all cases, despite its presence in an FDA-regulated medical device. The Microsoft Zune Bug was buried in a much better formatted snippet of code that performed a very similar calculation.

This is a follow up to my post about the poor code that TI shipped out with their Zigbee products. I saw posts today that they are shipping updated code, but how long will it take to get it rolled out.

This article really highlights how important good training, good review processes and I think much more open source review is needed as we move forward to the Internet of Things.

TI eZ-430 Chronos watch based wireless door lock

Ziyan Zhou and Zachery Shivers are two smart young guys studying at Rochester Institute of Technology. They have created a very nice project based on the low power TI 430 microcontroller and 9xx mHz wireless chips from Texas Instruments. I beat up on TI in a previous blog entry for their shoddy code review that allowed a big security bug to slip through in their Zigbee chips. Despite that fail, TI creates some very nice hardware that is enabling the Internet of Things. This project by Zhou and Shivers is a great example of what is going to explode in the coming months and years. They do a very nice job of reviewing security issues in their design. Give their project and the others at the TI430 low power design contest web site a look, good stuff! Vote for the one you think is tops, my vote was to Ziyan [Joe] and Zach.

TI Zigbee chips in SmartMeters easily hacked

It was very sad to see this article about the shoddy job that was done in creating a solid PRNG for the Zigbee smart meters that the TI chips are installed in. Apparently a large number of the current meters have the TI Zigbee hardware:
Texas Instruments to patch smart meter crypto blunder

You have to wonder about the quality of any other software coming out of that group. Were is the QA, code review? This reenforces my opinion that open source is the best path for much of the systems development going on now. Unless you can afford a Space Shuttle software development effort, I do not see other good routes to good software. This was such a basic blunder, with so much very recent history of similar shorts cuts causing WiFi systems to be vulnerable how could this happen?

This guy, Travis Goodspeed, and a couple of others are doing a real service getting these issue out in the light. And I am guessing with no help from the likes of TI, Zigbee or others.

While it not clear if this mistake will make it any more possible for hackers to 'bring the grid down'. It sure looks like it will slow the deployment of energy saving and GHG reducing solutions for residential and commercial buildings and that is bad enough.

Come on, you can do better!