Encrypting default WiFi connection after setup #397
Conversation
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Could you please push to the beta branch (as mentioned https://github.com/opendata-stuttgart/sensors-software !!!). And no, we won't merge this pull request as we are working on this. That we have to change all the instruction was mentioned in more than one place. And we have to do this in multiple languages, what is causing an additional delay for translations. |
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I looked here https://github.com/opendata-stuttgart/sensors-software/blob/master/contributing.md (I think this page was last edited by you) and didn't find any instructions on how to do pull requests. Never mind, I can redo the pull request to the beta branch as well. Anyway, if you don't consider merging my pull request it doesn't make sense to push it to another branch, does it? However, no need to be rude. My issue #383 was not discussed further, which I interpreted to be caused by a lack of time to do it. So I decided to try and contribute. It took quite some time to make everything compile correctly (by the way SoftwareSerial cannot be downloaded inside of Arduino IDE any more - opposed to the instructions here: https://github.com/opendata-stuttgart/sensors-software/tree/master/airrohr-firmware#verwendete-bibliotheken-f%C3%BCr-esp8266). No hard feelings, but I expected a little more appreciation for people spending their free time to improve your project. |
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No hard feelings, but we also expect some appreciation as we do this whole project unsalaried in our leisure time. We organize workshops, develop the firmware and map software, pay and administer all needed servers, add new sensors (beside this we try to develop a self-service portal to add new sensors) and so on. So sorry that we might not have seen this issue or had the time to answer this. |
As described in #383 there is a serious security issue when setting up the sensor for the first time.
The credentials of your home WiFi (or whatever WiFi you try to connect your sensor to) are transmitted in plain text so that a potential attacker can sniff them without any effort. Once inside your network the attacker could do a lot of harm to other devices on your network.
To overcome this problem, I introduced a default password "ParticulateMatter255" in
ext_def.h.Furthermore, I wanted to avoid that an attacker can easily find out this password by just reading the AP's SSID (when finding the default SSID "Feinstaubsensor-" the attacker would only have to search this word on google to find the default password which would enable him/her to decrypt the credentials again...). Therefore I renamed the SSID to the more generic term ESP which is used more widely and therefore wouldn't allow an attacker to directly deduct which password to use for decryption.
This is not a perfect solution but for ~90% of usecases this should be safe enough and in any case much safer than the actual solution of not having any encryption on the default access point.
Keep in mind that the manual(s) for setting up the sensor need to be adapted to these changes.