alt Hacker NewsThis is pure laziness aka “reduced time to market” on the part of Flock.
It takes time and effort to think through proper secure boot architecture and to implement key management in a way that doesn’t kill developer productivity.
Their product managers, though, should have realized that setting these up in unsecured public spaces means that their threat model really does include local physical access to everything.
Using off the shelf hardware and software stacks all but guarantees attackers have tools at their fingertips to exploit said physical access.
Given all the recent exploits hitting the kernel, there’s a good chance that there exists an exploitable over-the-air vulnerability present in their WiFi/bluetooth stack, too.
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It’s not laziness, it’s hyper focus on compliance. CJIS is the policy maintained by the FBI that handles information security, which is derived from standards built around paper.
Adding more weirdness, the details get worked out by each state.
My guess is they encrypted whatever is criminal justice information (license plate hotlists, etc) or protected by local laws (DMV data) and left the rest to make it easier to deploy and service. Remember pictures of you or your car taken in public are not protected or in scope.
Police tech is garbage and usually driven by federal grant spending. So it’s going to be interesting to see how Flock and Axon grow the business as it turns into a service model.
The question is, why should they care at all? Will this hurt their business?
I really hate how Product Managers somehow get to take the reins of engineering teams instead of having to sell them product ideas.
It's madness, they often lack the technical skills and "optimise away" requirements surfaced by eng teams they don't comprehend or just don't like having to deal with.
The flip side of this laziness is that now, when my elected representatives tell me "these are just license-plate readers that don't record video", I have evidence to show them that's false.
If Flock had done a more competent job of securing their system, it would be harder to demonstrate this in a compelling way. To a technically-inclined person, it's obvious from the get-go that somewhere in Flock's pipeline, video is being recorded and archived, and is therefore vulnerable to misuse. But the more they're allowed to keep the implementation proprietary, the easier this is to sweep under the rug.