Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

Re:Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protec... by stronglikedan on Monday January 14, 2019 @12:15PM (#18904529)

> Packet sniffing and hardware inspection both instantly disprove...

I'm under the impression that packet sniffing is useless with end-to-end encryption, but I could be wrong. I.e., you can tell that something is being sent, but you can't know what.

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Re:Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protec... by Arelius on Monday January 14, 2019 @12:23PM (#18904583)

The theory is that we can still estimate how much data goes over the network. So if it were sending all audio to the cloud, we'd see.

It does however not exclude other information, like sending keyword flags, or storing audio fragments to send along with other messages later on.

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Re:Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protec... by dcbadacd on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:31PM (#18905137)

Neither does it exclude the possibility of any "time-bomb"-type of features or future OTA updates altering the software's behavior.

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Re:Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protec... by LeftTurnSignal on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:32PM (#18905146)

If OP can show what they use to packet sniff those boxes, then life will be good and we can put the conspiracy theories to bed.

If they can't see all of the traffic, but just know where the traffic is going, then I don't think they did their homework.

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Re:Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protec... by UncleMeat on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:20PM (#18907077)

You own the client. You can do anything to it. There is no way for encryption on the client to prevent you from inspecting the content.

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