Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

I had truly good “hacking” session with Codex. It’s not hacking, I wasn’t breaking anything, just jumping over the fences TP-Link put for me, owning the router, inside the network, knowing the admin password. But TP-Link really tried everything so you cannot access the router you own via API. They really tried to be smart with some very very broken and custom auth and encryption scheme. It took some half a day with Codex, but in the end I have a pretty Python API to access my router, tested, reliable, and exporting beautiful Prometheus metrics.

I’m sure there is some over eager product manager sitting in such companies, trying to splits markets into customer and enterprise sections, just by making APIs not useable by humans and adding 200% useless “security by obscurity”.

It’s important to note that Codex was given access to the source code. In another comment thread that is currently on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780456), the opinion is repeatedly voiced that being closed source doesn’t provide a material benefit in defending against vulnerabilities being discovered and exploited using AI. So it would be interesting to see how Codex would fare here without access to the source code.

Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.

My Philips smart tv started to give hints of programmed obsolescence this week, after 4 or 5 years. Besides the fact that I cannot install any real apps other than the ones built in this model (YouTube, Netflix and Prime). How I wish I could hack it and install another os. Honestly I don't think I have the time anymore to investigate this kind of thing. I decided to leave this comment here in hopes of someone pointing me in the right direction, if there's one. For now I'm thinking about getting a TV box and ditching the smart features all together.

The trick here was providing the firmware source code so it could see your vulnerabilities.

If I could turn a Samsung Smart TV into a dumb TV, or even just a basic monitor with input selection and basic volume control, I'd definitely take it.

It hacked a weak TV OS with full source. Next-level, aka full access to the main controls (vol, input, tint, aspect, firmware, etc.) is still much too hard for LLMs to understand.

Maybe we could get codex to strip the ads and the phone-home features out of smart TVs?

While cool and slightly scary news - Samsung TV's have been incredibly hackable for the past decade, wouldn't be surprised if GPT2 with access to a browser could hack a Samsung!

> [1] Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV,

Does anyone know what the author meant by this? Are they talking about a web browser run on the TV?

Even with all the constraints that others criticize here it is pretty amazing.

Give an experienced human this tool at hand he can achieve exploitation with only a few steering inputs.

Cool stuff

The real problem here is that the LLM vendors think this is bad publicity and its leading to them censoring their systems.

Do people really chat with LLMs like "bro wtf etc..."? I would expect that to trigger some confrontational behavior.

Gilfoyle would be proud.

Putting aside the fact this was "cheating" because it got access to source code.

I am very here for a world where we can take back control, at scale, of the enshittified, you'll-own-nothing, ad-ridden consumer electronics our capitalist overlords have decided we deserve, by investing some amount of collective token-$, instead of having to pray one smart adhd nerd buys the same TV and decides to take a look.

OTOH, as with anything LLMs take over, I'm concerned we'll soon have very few smart adhd nerds left to work on liberating the next generation of hardened devices.

"Browser foothold: we already had code execution inside the browser application's own security context on the TV, which meant the task was not "get code execution somehow" but "turn browser-app code execution into root.""

Finding the initial foothold is the hardest part. Codex didn't have anything to do with it.

> Reading the matching ntkdriver sources is also where the Novatek link became clear: the tree is stamped throughout with Novatek Microelectronics identifiers, so these ntk* interfaces were not just opaque device names on the TV, but part of the Novatek stack Samsung had shipped.

Lol, a true classic in the embedded world. Some hardware company (it appears these guys make display panel controllers?) ships a piece of hardware, half-asses a barely working driver for it, another company integrates this with a bunch of other crap from other vendors into a BSP, another company uses the hardware and the BSP to create a product and ships it. And often enough the final company doesn't even have an idea about what's going on in the innards of the BSP - as long as it's running their layer of slop UI and it doesn't crash half the time, it's fine, and if it does, it's off to the BSP provider to fix the issues.

But at no stage anywhere is there a security audit, code quality checks or even hardware quality checks involved - part of why BSPs (and embedded product firmwares in general) are full of half-assed code is because often enough the drivers have to work around hardware bugs / quirks somehow that are too late to fix in HW because tens to hundreds of thousands of units have already been produced and the software people are heavily pressured to "make it work or else we gotta write off X million dollars" and "make it work fast because the longer you take, the more money we lose on interest until we can ship the hardware and get paid for it", and if they are particularly unlucky "it MUST work until deadline X because we need to get the products shipped to hit Christmas/Black Friday sales windows or because we need to beat <competitor> in time-to-market, it's mandatory overtime until it works".

And that is how you get exploits so braindead easy that AI models can do the job. What a disgusting world, run to the ground by beancounters.

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Codex exploited or you exploited? It's like saying a hammer drove a nail, without acknowledging the hand and the force it exerted and the human brain behind it.

All the news regarding AI finding weaknesses or "hacking" stuff - is that actually hacking? Isn't it also a kind of bruteforce attack? Just throw resources at something, see what comes out. Yea, some software security issues haven't been found for 15 years, but not because there were no competent security specialists out there who could have found it, but most likely because there is a lot of software and nobody has time to focus on everything. Of course, an AI trained on decades of findings, lots of time and lots of resources, can tackle much more than one person. But this is not revolutionary technological advance, it is an upscaling of a kind based on the work of many very talented people before that.