Im uncomfortable with what I read that every company of significant size in China automatically requires CCP party members to be involved in the company at a high level.
So Im very happy to hear people such as these guys are looking deep at this.
Ofcourse since Espressif controls the hardware, so they can do anything eventually. My itch will always be there and Im going to switch once I find something made in preferably the EU when I find something comparable to esp32. Maybe Nordic Semiconductors will make some nice risk-v chips and dev-boards soon.
It also seems that Espressif has bought their wifi IP, so their contracts and licensing terms with the IP vendor likely prevent any sharing.
But FCC is the reason for closed binary blob firmware for all wifi radios out there these days.
This is why open firmware can be really handy for the security community.
GSM->5G modems are a lot harder to debug... maybe now in recent years with cheaper SDRs, but a lot harder then wifi.
And not sure why you'd be afraid of CCP, we saw the wikileaks, USA does a lot of similiarly bad stuff too and even got caught doing it... and if you live in a "western" country, USA has much easier access to you than China.
If the IoT ecosystem has any weak spots, it is the Tuya software stack. It would be much easier, much more useful layer to put a back door into that.
I find little solace in this whataboutism.
Learn more about Espressif's founder. And I think the CCP party cannot impact Espressif.
------- Singapore’s bilingual education gave the engineer an adequate command of Chinese; he played translator for his Chinese and non-Chinese speaking staff in meetings during Espressif’s early days.
And the time he spent in national service with the Singapore Armed Forces taught him the importance of being in the front line, of knowing the ground well.
The CEO believes that entrepreneurship cannot be taught. One needs to have a head for risk-taking, creativity, a big-picture perspective, and to be prepared to fail.
And passion, of course.
He has a nugget of wisdom for those who have yet to find theirs: “There are two things that drive people... One is passion, the other is fear... If you lose that fear, you might find your passion.”
So I'm not sure that framing your paranoia in terms of "the Chinese" is productive - you might just want to update that thought with "any state actor who operates covert torture sites and violates human rights at immense scale", in which case your set of actually hostile actors becomes a little more realistic.
The biggest threat to your freedom and human rights, as an American, is your own government.
Yes, except the China also 'infiltrate' Chinese companies themselves, and can perhaps order them to put in backdoors.
The NSA generally does not order US companies around, as evidenced by the fact it's been documented that they intercept shipments and compromise the systems on their own:
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
If the NSA had an 'in' into Cisco (or Juniper, or Aruba, etc), they wouldn't need to clandestinely have their own 'compromise factories'.
Yes, both the Chinese and NSA do cyber stuff, but so does every country. At the very least the odds of getting a 'clean' product from an American supplier compared to a Chinese one are higher: the links between Chinese companies and government are often murky.
Or more subtly they could insert (or just not fix) a bug which allows packet descriptors to be overwritten on reception of a certain malformed WiFi packet, e.g. too short or long, which makes it possible to overwrite regions of the device's memory and thus compromise it. A SDR might be required to transmit the malformed packet(s).
By the way, I wonder if modern Realtek switch chips might still support RRCP, and an undocumented EEPROM bit or strapping resistor might re-enable it?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek_Remote_Control_Protoco...
You can write these registers via the management interface or via the EEPROM. It will not respond to discovery packets, but get and set packets work fine.
This chip also has a 8051 core that can access the internal bus and can tx/rx network packets. To use it you either attach external SPI flash (large program) or write the program into the internal RAM in the chip (small program).
All documented stuff, no secret details.
That's fair but Espressif is wayyyyyyy more open than ANY Western chip maker. The entire framework and toolchains are open-source for one thing. You get listings and sometimes pseudo-code for the internal ROMs (though no code). You get full access to datasheets, technical reference, and sdk documentation. Everything in their SDK is documented. You even get help on github. All of that accessible to anyone anywhere at any time.
Contrast that to the last time I worked with Nordic in a professional manner, I had to sign NDAs to get the full documentation and toolchain. Their toolchain contained binary blobs that when inquired about you get told "don't worry about it ;)" which is shockingly frustrating when a crash occurs in them and you're left trying to work around it. And if you're not a professional you're basically SOL and left with half-baked community toolchains, when they exist for a particular chip.
They are, not as CPU necessarily but for exactly those auxiliary functions: https://blog.nordicsemi.com/getconnected/why-nordic-is-getti...
Do you know about this
https://www.swisscommunity.org/en/news-media/swiss-review/ar... https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
So... you are basing your fears on just that, hunches and yet presumably your own government is spying on others and maybe you but that doesnt bother you because USA /five eyes are the "good guys"
Espressif has also launched a new ESP32C3 based on RISC-V, with modules priced at around $2.
cant wait until they can make a dual-core risc-v but p.happy on the -s3
It consists of a high-performance (HP) 32-bit RISC-V processor, which can be clocked up to 160 MHz, and a low-power (LP) 32-bit RISC-V processor, which can be clocked up to 20 MHz. It has a 320KB ROM, a 512KB SRAM, and works with external flash. It comes with 30 (QFN40) or 22 (QFN32) programmable GPIOs, with support for SPI, UART, I2C, I2S, RMT, TWAI, PWM, SDIO, Motor Control PWM. It also packs a 12-bit ADC and a temperature sensor.
https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c6
[The High Performance] CPU . . . has 4-stage, in-order, scalar pipeline optimized for area, power and performance. CPU core complex has a debug module (DM), interrupt-controller (INTC), core local interrupts (CLINT) and system bus (SYS BUS) interfaces for memory and peripheral access.
The ESP32-C6 Low-Power CPU (LP CPU) . . . features ultra-low power consumption and has a 2 stage, in-order, and scalar pipeline. [It has same features but lacks core local interrupts (CLINT)].
https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...
There is a bunch of hand wavy information on building faraday cages online, some people suggesting to utilize a microwave oven, since they operate at the same frequency.
There are even wifi faraday cages for sale on amazon.
However I can't really find much actual benchmark data online about how well these various approaches actually attenuate signals.
Anyone have a recommendation on conducting fabric for RF isolation as briefly mentioned in the article or resources on the subject of rf isolation/Faraday cages for microcontrollers?
Charles@turnsys.com
I have quite a collection of research material on RF cages / testing .
For the Bouffalo Lab and Beken WiFi SoCs we already have SVD files[1] for the WiFi MAC (and likely the PHY too). Thus we have nearly complete documentation for all chip registers and their bitfields. Both SoCs are based on CEVA RivieraWaves WiFi IP.
Also you might be able to use it as a SDR for the 2.4GHz band, there appears to be registers to send ADC data to on-chip SRAM. And USB 2.0 High Speed device functionality on some of the Bouffalo chips.
I was thinking of hacking it to use as a cheap uplink to the QO-100 amateur radio satellite, which uplinks in the 2.4GHz band. I think 100mW of power might be just enough for CW or some very narrowband PSK mode.
By the way, on the Bouffalo devices, watch out for the eFuse registers, they're not fully lockable and write protectable, one wrong register write and the whole chip itself can be bricked and stuck permanently in secure boot mode. It happened to me, and I'm going to try and work around it by glitching the clock input on boot, just at the right time, to disrupt the eFuse reading, just for the fun of it.
1. https://github.com/bouffalolab/bl_iot_sdk/blob/master/compon...
Wow, that's a lot. If OP could upload somewhere the list of accesses together with a stack trace for each, I think we could crowd source a rewrite of each function - I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of those are repetitive patterns - ie. 'run this transmission test 1000 times while increasing the power levels each time until the received power = some set value'.
I have no idea what my first project should be. Any ideas?
Have you tried just replaying those 50,000 accesses and seeing if things work? Obviously some things might not be correctly calibrated, but merely knowing that a simple replay works tells you that there are no complex hardware/software handshakes (ie. Take random token from here and write it to there). It also tells you that the process is probably fairly timing independent.
Admittedly, this is a non-issue for hobby scale projects, but is potentially a blocker for commercial applications.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bad thing, but worth discussion.
MAC is at OSI Layer 2. FCC concerns about radio power occur at the PHY layer, OSI Layer 1:
> On the ESP32, the PHY layer is implemented in hardware; most of the MAC layer is implemented in the proprietary blob. One notable exception to this separation is sending acknowlegement frame: if a device receives a frame, it should send a packet back to acknowledge that this packet was received correctly. This ACK packet needs to be sent within ~10 microseconds; it would be hard to get this timing correct in software.
* https://pics.zeus.gent/vYXyQm2t9pJCzpDdWFvq9oWR2DACoUJoTsYf8...
But the closed radio parts are indeed horrible. Qualcomm (US Intelligence) and Broadcom (Chinese intelligence) controlling the physical layer underneath is as disturbing as the various Intel, AMD, ARM backdoors in their pre-OS layers.
(sprite_tm works at Espressif)
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/v4.3/esp32/ap...
I'd be very surprised if there's not an exploit that will get the CPU to barf up the full ROM contents. That's if there isn't a more direct way to read it.
Even in the extremely unlikely case that it can't be read programmatically, you can always physically decode it with a microscope and a working eyeball.
From there, it's "just" a matter of decompiling the machine code into something readable. It's not trivial, but it can be done by a single person in a reasonable timeframe.
How long did it take you to get the environment and tools set up, so you could start digging in?
Is time or money a more valuable investment at this stage? If it's not too forward, how much would be useful to your organisation? (I can email if preferred.)
And with the amount of tinkering that happens with these, if it were calling home someone would really have figured it out by now.
Less about protocol development and more fear of 5G and wifi.
The prices of this things can be quite high. Which is why I bought my small one as used surplus.
One can find a great amount of models from various manufacturers here: https://www.everythingrf.com/search/shielded-test-enclosures
And none of them look cheap. But more "please call for quote"-type of things.
I'm surprised their paint can only gave them a 10 dB difference. I've found simply wrapping things in aluminum foil is good for about 40 dB when it comes to Wi-Fi.
Out of random interest I tested the "put a phone in it and call it" and it didn't work (as did wifi) that's mentioned in [2].
[1] https://www.hea.de/fachwissen/mikrowellen/sicherheit
[2] https://www.sfu.ca/phys/346/121/resources/physics_of_microwa...
https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday
It's a few years old, but seems pretty thorough.
This doesn’t really answer your question, but it feels like it’s worth mentioning.
There are also 'premium' devkits with smaller and nicer packaging e.g. I like m5 devkits that are inch-by-inch-by-halfinch blocks at $7.5 for https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/AtomS3%20Lite or with an integrated screen for $15.5 https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atoms3-dev-kit-w-0-85-inch... is useful for visual feedback.
If you use a bare module then you need a basic 3.3V serial adapter and maybe a jumper wire to ground pin 0 to enter programming mode.
You can also do stuff with JTAG, which will let you use a debugger, but that's not mandatory. Espressif sells a dirt cheap one. I think maybe you can use your jlink for that with some fiddling but I'm not certain.
Worth noting that this includes JTAG over USB.
You can even run Python on microcontrollers these days. See Adafruit's https://circuitpython.org for which they publish modules for many (almost all?) of the sensors they sell. The modern microcontroller frameworks hide much of the complexity of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, filesystems, etc. so you can do complicated things with minimal effort. You can really cobble something together in an afternoon.
The "hello world" of microcontrollers is making an LED blink. Then figuring out how to print a message out over serial (print debugging is invaluable). Then maybe figure out how to make a Wi-Fi connection and an HTTP request. Then go on a shopping spree on Adafruit or SparkFun for $9 sensors that spark your imagination and figure out how to talk to them; Adafruit publishes zillions of tutorials you can copy from: https://learn.adafruit.com
Then, connect an RGB LED and experiment with PWM signal generation.
Then, experiment with network programming, accepting a UDP packet to the ESP32 that sets the color of the RGB LED.
I wrote lots of easy to follow tutorials there.
It depends a lot on the sensors you have. That said, even without any (or few) sensor(s) you can still have fun with network related applications like a Telegram bot.
I'm sure the lads that spent decades in Guantanamo with no charges brought against them after being kidnapped based on their watch model will be very glad to hear they have civil rights.
i live under a literal tyrant right now in india. does it really matter if i have "Civil rights" and china and usa and india is snooping on me?
https://www.onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2023/12/02/kollam-chi...
here. this is literally fresh off the oven.
26000 people's internet history was looked with a fine tooth comb in order to find that one IP which had viewed tom and jerry on youtube. youtube wouldnt give information but ISPs are by law or otherwise willing to "help" the police because its a "my way or highway" rule with the government.
so my point is, did i consent to this snooping? i am "supposed" to have laws but "think of the children". next time it is political opponents or dissidents as has been the case.
this isn't just in india or china or usa but everywhere.
For a while (not any more though) you can't sell an ACR122U RFID card reader online in China, just because mfoc [1] supports it nicely and it got a reputation of "smart card cloner".
i prefer using dual-core designs over one uC for WiFi + one uC for realtime UI + TFT screens, so much cleaner and less hardware to worry about
literally porting the design i'm working on rn to that one :) ty!
By the way, Some of the Broadcom chips have an integrated 8051, with on-chip ROM firmware. There are leaked datasheets floating around somewhere as well. If someone has the time to dump the on-chip ROM, it would be interesting to see what's in there. Note, some of the pins marked NC in the datasheet are in fact the 8051 UART TX/RX lines.
As does the USA's own spy agencies. There is literally no moral authority on this issue that can be claimed by America over China. Did you overlook the multiple NSA backdoors implemented by Microsoft over the years, or just have not caught up to this situation, yet? See also - Intel: TPM.
>The NSA generally does not order US companies around
I believe this to be false on the basis of multiple whistleblower leaks which demonstrate otherwise. Not to mention that American companies have evolved the canary mechanism as a means of bypassing strict secrecy rules around disclosure of this influence by the spooks.
>At the very least the odds of getting a 'clean' product from an American supplier compared to a Chinese one are higher: the links between Chinese companies and government are often murky.
I do not believe this to be true one bit. China and America are equivalent when it comes to trustworthiness, which is to say neither country has the moral authority to claim a more ethical behaviour over the other when it comes to human rights.
China doesn't operate Pine Gap - the worlds biggest, wholesale violator of human rights at massive scale, ever.
And then, there's this:
https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-google-push-notificat...
Not much different to what the CCP can do to its people...
That has to be at least 5 years ago, but even back then, 99% of their software was out in the open. Now, their SDK is open source, their official toolchain is based on the Linux Foundation's Zephyr toolchain and their docs are open and buildable. Their support is done on an open forum and complete data sheets are available both as PDFs and (with the exception of the nRF51) as web pages. They aren't allowed to publish their LTE stack because of operator licensing, their Bluetooth link layer is still distributed as a library and some upcoming SoCs aren't publicly available yet, but aside from this, they're as open as they can possibly be.
The ESP8266 essentially started out as a wifi modem, responding to AT commands transmitted over serial, but going from there to a full standalone device relied on a lot of work by enthusiasts[0] and a leaked proprietary SDK[1].
[0]: https://hackaday.com/2014/09/06/the-current-state-of-esp8266...
[1]: https://tweakers.net/reviews/7992/community-interview-sprite...
Also, in my limited understanding, even changing the physical antenna can alter transmission power characteristics in such a way that it likely violates some limit, at least for some very specific wavelength or direction.
Related, this is a neat experiment which powers a galvanically isolated circuit optically using LEDs and a solar cell: https://youtu.be/9JinSfCKuNQ?t=823&si=kBwesUsVgAGBVVwq
He didn't need to block RF though, the interface seems mechanically challenging to build into a cage.
Even a solid metal box with a few small holes will struggle.
But there are things they won't touch it seems, like LoRa support.
Also I might be wrong but so far I don't think you can leverage cool things like ESP-NOW (yet).
All of the provided controls are bad. It's incredibly difficult to get it on the network. The documentation is laughable.
It took me three hours to get a simple RGB strip working. All it had to do was drive three PWM signals. The esp has hardware specifically for that. It took a lot of effort to even find out how to use the LEDC hardware, much less how to assign a pin and hook it to the color picker.
I also wanted to hang an IR LED off it to control my TV and such. No sort of configurable button panel, you get one giant widget per action.
I did eventually get it working, but honestly it would have been so much faster to just write my own firmware to talk to HA directly.
>civil rights.... haha
I wasn't even talking about you lmao.
The USA regularly uses its intelligence apparatus to undermine economy and industry in other countries. I would even say, at a far greater rate, with worse results (for the targets) than anything China or Russia are doing ..
The mass violation of human rights for billions of people (literally) that occurs every millisecond of the day at Pine Gap on behalf of the American government, for example, demonstrates that this naivete is very, very dangerous.
This was my point. How often does it use its power to undermine the US economy or industry in the US?
It also rather infamously claimed it never partakes in industrial espionage, despite it being somewhat well documented in 1990s that they do.
Generally, if the contract is big enough, and specially if the companies involved have military/intelligence ties otherwise as well (every bigger MIC corp), you can expect ITC, NSA, CIA and occasionally FBI and others to all be involved in unethical work related to getting the contract won by US vendor.
This was my point. They don't steal trade secrets in order to harm US companies.
I can also remove my lights and breaks from my car and it will still work, but if authorities find out I might be in trouble.
Wifi is shared spectrum and devices using are licenced to make sure they conform to the local regulations. One size does not fit all. For example 2.4GHz wifi channel 13 is legal in EU, but in USA it falls on a govt owned band. This is why companies like Mikrotik or Ubiquiti have specific hardware versions for USA. So that they verifiably cannot be set on illegal channels by the enduser.
The reason sometimes given by vendors that "FCC demands the code to be proprietary" is an excuse.
So if the manufacturer makes a device where changing the firmware is "readily accessible" to the user and there is an open source firmware available that can circumvent the FCC transmission restrictions (for example, change the power limits or channel limits for wifi physical layer), then that could be grounds for FF refusing to certify that device, as it is not permitted to make, import or sell general unrestricted transmitters to the general public (there are certain exceptions for licensed operators, ham radio, experimental use by manufacturers etc).
It's similar to other clauses that prohibit manufacturers from making it easy for the user to modify the equipment - e.g. 15.203 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/15.203) "the use of a standard antenna jack or electrical connector is prohibited." so that the user can't easily replace the antenna with a different one from what was certified.
This is handy sometimes because in the EU it's the opposite, the 5 and 6 GHz bands are much smaller.
The reason the modules with integrated antenna are so popular is that the module carries its own certification, so you don't need to do it yourself.
If you use the module with an antenna connector instead of integrated, you must get your own FCC certification. It's for the entire system.
> Why can't one have an open source stack with specific builds that are approved, tested and certified?
Mainly because it's heinously expensive and difficult.
Again, it's a trendy buzzword to use but it literally isn't a catch all shield to argue that it's fine when we do it. When there's no proof of something happening, maybe we should focus on the thing that we know is happening instead of chasing literal ghosts
2) Your burden of proof might be different from mine, but one needs to be pretty naive to think that the CCP doesn't surveil western citizens. I doubt their intelligence apparatus is that bad at their job. In fact, I have plenty of reason to believe it's pretty great at it.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-chinese-communist-party-us...
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/27/china-ccp-spying-us-pol...
So, you don't mind being spied on by someone who was already caught spying on their own citizens, (assuming that you're from USA), has access to you, your finances, can lock you up, can suicide you in jail, etc., but you're afraid of china who has access to none of those powers?
It certainly isn't pointing out hypocrisy, establishing a common standard or a cureall in online discussions.
I've seen a proper "whataboutism" been used but only once (by a malfunctioning redditor from Eglin Airforce Base).
1. accept HTTP
2. check for valid endpoint
3. if yes, do thing and exit
4. if no, 'error'
I guess the only issue I see is you'd need some sort of firewalling or security. Otherwise any rando could fire HTTP requests at the thing and make it do stuff.
How would you structure this on the device's side? If a webserver's too big, then I imagine an init system is also too big.
Better to start with ESP-IDF, there's a pretty full featured well documented web server, and a lot more.
https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples/pr...
In my opinion US is only at fault for spying on it's own citizens(im not citizen nor resident of the us), and in doing so it undermined its counter intelegence actions against state adversaries. Next time there is a good guy in the white house, All intelligence apparatus should be dismantled and replaced with something more transparent for the people, even though the reality where most of the world is despotic by design and there for hostile to a supposed to be free nation is still there.
You can structure the on-device app as 'slaved' to the web requests, where it simply waits for requests in a loop and only does stuff in response to a request - for example, take a measurement from some sensors and send them back with some surrounding HTML.
Authentication/authorization is an issue, but it has all the same issues and solutions as webapps - login+session cookies; or whitelisting IP ranges; or TLS client certificates; etc.