Security News > 2023 > August > S3 Ep149: How many cryptographers does it take to change a light bulb?
Researchers have discovered how to trick you into thinking your iPhone is in Airplane mode while actually leaving mobile data turned on.
The main one seems to be that when you're setting up the light bulb for the first time, there is some effort put into making sure that the app and the light bulb each reason that they are communicating with the right sort of code at the other end.
The way it works in this case is that the app sends an RSA public key to the light bulb, and the light bulb uses that to encrypt and send back a one-time 128-bit AES key for the session.
The problem is that, once again, just like with that initial exchange, the light bulb makes no effort to communicate to the app, "Yes, I really am a light bulb."
That's a mode that is meant to ensure that if you send a packet with exactly the same data two, three, four or more times, you can't recognise that it's the same data.
How many cryptographers does it take to update a light bulb?