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!

Meanwhile on my GDScript codebase Codex questions itself 3 times in the same sentence and still gets it wrong: https://i.imgur.com/HF198nl.png

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

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.

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

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”.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Gilfoyle would be proud.

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

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.