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by gh02t 2690 days ago
> This unencrypted storage is what the article refers to and is largely unavoidable.

It is avoidable, the ESP32 supports transparently encrypted flash memory using a key that is stored in one-time-programmable, tamper-resistant fuse bits. The intended use is to make exactly this sort of attack considerably more difficult. Unlike the ESP8266, the '32 has quite a few security features, none of which are enabled here apparently.
1 comments
alias_neo 2690 days ago
We aren't in disagreement, I mentioned the secure key storage ("secure element") in my first comment, the problem is that people aren't using it.

I qualified my point with "largely" to be clear that I'm not saying it's unavoidable.

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gh02t 2688 days ago
Yes, I guess my point was that in this case it's trivially avoidable. Enabling these features in the ESP32 is really easy and doesn't have any significant downsides AFAIK, I don't understand why LIFX didn't. It's far from unhackable but I think enabling flash encryption and locking the JTAG and flash read would be perfectly acceptable security-wise.
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