Comment by jonas21
Comment by jonas21 10 hours ago
The NTSB's original report has more detail on how the SD Card was encrypted and how the NTSB managed to decrypt it:
https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
Comment by jonas21 10 hours ago
The NTSB's original report has more detail on how the SD Card was encrypted and how the NTSB managed to decrypt it:
https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...
I'll admit I only watched a video on it not the report, but it had pictures reportedly redacted at manufacturer request. It showed a teensy 3 and some adafruit qwiic board in there. Obviously the real engineering is in the enclosure. Otherwise it could just be a webcam. But still, it's clearly not a very in depth electrical design. I'm all for SoMs if you can but they don't guarantee you the adventure of custom hardware bringing moving through all the software stacks and whatnot.
Indeed this is massively overcomplicated, as one only needs to see what dashcams use to know that you don't need, or perhaps want, an entire OS on it.
Does not leave SubC in a particularly flattering light...
They had no idea how their own product worked. They didn’t even know it used encrypted storage.
This was either outsourced or done by some junior engineer who was putting pieces together like it was another Raspberry Pi project that just needed to kind of work.
That’s my entire experience in embedded. Everything I get from other companies basically looks like an internship project right down to the pointer arguments with unspecified bounds on the function calls. One of the companies we bought hardware from keeps representing things are working when they only work on devices in the lab. Almost nobody in the space produces anything professional and everything uses Yocto even for two person projects where Multistrap would be more productive.
What kind of hardware projects do you work on?
I'm mostly in the software space but in the past few years I've been doing a lot more embedded stuff, and the trend I notice is that companies are making great hardware, and then completely ruining its usefulness with bad software and firmware. It's kind of mind blowing to me because I always considered software to be the easy part of making a product, compared to, you know, etching microscopic patterns onto sand to make magical transistors appear in just the right way to do the task you want.
The System on Module board is an Inforce 6601 SOM. [0]
It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and they provide prebuilt Ubuntu Linaro distros for it, preconfigured for the board.
The camera manufacturer likely just tossed it straight in as configured and thus didn't know how the full disk encryption was setup.
This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this project to some undergrad engineering students who've never designed a commercial product before and had no price target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.
See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever manufactured.
[0] https://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-rugged-com-runs-linux-or-androi...