All it takes is a single goatse to appear on one child's furby's eyes or on a demo unit in a shop and the brand is ruined. I think they need to reconsider that response.
Perhaps you're unaware that an earlier edition of this product had a bug that made the device randomly speak with a terrifying satanic voice. My niece experienced it first hand
I agree, especially now that there's a rather comprehensive documentation available online clearly it doesn't require a "tremendous amount of engineering" to hack the device anymore.
It also seems like it would be rather trivial to mitigate this issue in an update, either by securing the BLE connection or by signing and verifying update payloads (or preferably both).
Bluetooth LE range is easily magnified with a cantenna. The device will play audio sent to it over an unencrypted unauthenticated link to your kids. Also it will show videos sent over the same link (but they must be small because eyes are small)
Because they probably paid some contractor to design it and requesting this as an update would be expensive. Most likely some director doesn't think it's worth the money. Furthermore, the security team / one random guy who is now told to handle security duties after they got that e-mail most likely has an IT background and thinks reverse engineering embedded systems is impossibly difficult.
It would only be done if the press started publishing clickbait involving "THIS TOY IS WATCHING YOUR CHILDREN!!" as most IoT security not done by the top companies is entirely reactive.
Pairing is a big paint point though AIUI, releasing this toy with the need to pair it first would probably have cost them significant numbers of returns. Not saying it's justified, but ...
Perhaps they could give away an optional tin-foil suit for furbies of owners who have security concerns!
Oh yeah, totally. BLE support on both android and iOS is lacking. Older versions of android, and I believe all versions of iOS (please correct me if I'm wrong) do not offer a programmatic way of supplying the pin for pairing. This means that when you programmatically connect to a BLE device from an app, the user will get a pin prompt. This prompt covers most of the screen so it really is a pain.
Though for the furby it shouldn't be too bad. Just display the pin on one of its eyes.
> A tremendous amount of engineering would be required to reverse engineer the product as well as to create new firmware.
Which implies they failed to understand what they were being told. The engineering required to do this exploit has already been done, so it doesn't matter how hard it is. Once it's been done, it's been done.
