30 years ago I had a friendly discussion with an experienced veteran engineer, in which I pointed out the cranes moving tons of molten steel around the factory, were remote controlled with no encryption or security in sight. The response I got:
“LOL. We don’t need any of that, who would ever want to mess with (a crane carrying some tons of hot molten steel)?”
As IoT has slowly clawed its way into more and more places, we can see over and over the same “factory engineering” approach to security: “Who would ever want to mess with X?”. Well, turns out every hacker out there would want to mess with your webcam, smart tv, fridge, toaster, lights, fan, switch strip, vacuum, crane, drill, centrifuge, and everything with a processor in it… either to siphon data, for a botnet, as an entry point, for ransom, for sabotage, or just for the lulz!
As microcontrollers become cheaper, IPv6 expands to have them all publicly addressable, and people keep falling from the “controllable from your phone” into the “controllable from your AR viewer”…
More and more technology has become dependent on remote servers, which not only fucks up reliability but also allows them to install stupid fucking DRM in everything, upsell subscriptions, and take away features on a fucking whim.
I don’t buy anything that doesn’t need an internet connection or doesn’t have a FOSS alternative, which is almost nothing these days.
In an ideal world: a wrench would self-adjust torque limits for every particular bolt, get that data directly from the plans for the part being worked on, and log every wrenching operation for quality control and compliance purposes.
In the real world: because it’s another bullet point the manufacturer can charge for.
I’m guessing it’s about documenting the assembly of safety-critical components. If some part of, let’s say an airplane fails because a bolt comes loose, the manufacturer wants to have a paper trail attached to it to prove that this specific bolt was indeed torqued to the correct spec. Connecting the wrench to the network could make this documentation much easier.
Changes the torque and the application of said torque for each bolt. As in “tool head has 5° of give until in place, then in ramps torque to 5nM over half a second, and holds for 1 second and then ramps to zero over .1 seconds”, and then something different for the next bolt. Then it logs that it did this for each bolt.
The tool can also be used to measure and correct the bolts as part of an inspection phase, and log the results of that inspection.
Finally, it tracks usage of the tool and can log that it needs maintenance or isn’t working correctly even if it’s just a subtle failure.
Sick, so now I get to worry about the fucking emergency exits being ripped off the plane I’m flying on because the network connected torque wrench was hacked and displayed the proper torque setting while under torquing the bolts.
Can we not connect every fucking thing to the Internet?
Add comment