Episode 252: Colin O’Flynn On Hacking An Oven To Make It Stop Lying

In this episode of the podcast (Episode 252), host Paul Roberts speaks with Colin O’Flynn, CTO and founder of the firm NewAE about his work to patch shoddy software on his home’s electric oven – and the bigger questions about owners rights to fix, tinker with or replace the software that powers their connected stuff. [Video Podcast] | [MP3] | [Transcript] There is no shortage of interesting talks at this year’s Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas – with everything from an address by the U.S.’s acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden, to a string of talks on supply chain security (thanks GitHub!) to an excellent discussion of the pros and cons of software “lemon laws.” (I wrote a post on “must see” Black Hat sessions which you can check out over on ReversingLabs blog!) But Black Hat’s most radical and norm-busting talk isn’t about any of those things. Instead, it’s about how a fixture of our everyday lives – our ovens – may be lying to us, and the implications of that for owners of software-driven stuff everywhere. Colin O’Flynn is the CTO at NewAE I’m speaking of course about Oven Repair (The Hardware Hacking Way), a presentation by Colin O’Flynn, a Canadian security researcher and CTO of the embedded software security firm NewAE. Colin’s talk takes place Thursday, August 10 at 10:20 and if you’re attending Black Hat, you should make it a point to attend. You can also read about Colin’s research over at his website, colinoflynn.com. Going cold turkey… I had the pleasure to interview Colin on The Security Ledger podcast about the problem he encountered soon after he and his wife purchased their home: a Samsung electric oven that was routinely telling them their oven was hotter than it really was, resulting in woefully undercooked food including a turkey that needed more than an hour of extra cooking time. O’Flynn wasn’t alone. Going online to research the problem, he soon discovered that many other Samsung oven users had encountered the same problem across a range of ovens. Even his in-laws were finding that their Samsung oven didn’t accurately display the temperature. Encore Podcast: Chris Valasek on Hacking The Jeep Cherokee For most home appliance owners, that’s a problem that would beget calls to an appliance repair shop, some ‘shot in the dark’ efforts to recalibrate the oven or (pricey) repairs to replace the “usual suspects” – ba...