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How to sleep better when your bed is a backdoor

· 3 min read
Dave G

How to Sleep Better When Your Bed is a Backdoor​

The folks at over at Truffle Security performed some excellent research on the Eight Sleep Internet connected bed "Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed ◆ Truffle Security Co. . It will come as no surprise to anyone who follows IoT security that the bed has some serious security problems, most notably the ability for Eight Sleep's engineering team to be able to ssh in to the bed's on-board computer, via what appears to be a shared support account.

What can one do with this kind of access?​

Let's start with the basics:

They can know when you sleep
They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1
They can know when it's night, and no people are in the bed
Imagine your ex works for Eight Sleep. Or imagine they want to know when you're not home.
(Of course, they can also change the bed's temperature, turn on the vibrating feature, turn off your alarm clock, and any of the other normal controls they have power over.)
Beyond the basics, what does access to a device on your home network grant them? Any other device connected to that home network - smart fridges, smart stoves, smart washing machines, laptops - is typically routable via your bed. The (in)security of those devices is now entrusted to random Eight Sleep engineers.

It's easy to focus on the immediate access this gives to the information that this gives Eight Sleep, but generally speaking, using IoT devices like this generally means you've chosen to give up some level of privacy.

The part that you definitely didn't sign up for was the sheer number of devices that intentionally and/or unintentionally provide remote access into a network that typically allows every device to talk to every other device.

An attacker could:

  • Passively observe network traffic on your home network by sniffing
  • Attack other devices by using Machine In The Middle technique against other WiFi Devices with shared passwords
  • Get precise location information by sniffing nearby SSIDs
  • Extend their access to other devices by exploiting poor configuration and vulnerabilities in the remote attack surface of other network devices

And if you think you can just shut off internet access to this bed, you'd be wrong. Like an increasing number of devices, it requires internet access to function. While the blog post does have a hack that allows you to replace the WiFi connected device with an aquarium chiller. This is impractical for most people, especially if you think about how many other IoT devices there are in your home.

The best solution to this problem is device isolation. Many modern enterprises already do this, and your home deserves the same level of security.