[security] Introducing signing support to MySensors

[Anticimex]

Hi,
I suggest you read the doxygen documentation for signing carefully as it answers the questions you have. Signing does not in any way prevent anyone from reading your messages. As I have described in the documentation, it provides authenticity. That is, you can trust the sender of a signed message to be yours and not someone else's.

[ahmedadelhosni]

@Anticimex Yeah I understand it doesn't prevent anyone from reading my messages, and that's what I am trying to do now. To hack the system depending on the data available. But when I read the post I understood that encryption is not a priority as signing is enough now to prevent an attacker from sending data, but it can read text. I thought I will find clear text describing that I am sending to node X value Y but I found this 2;255;3;0;17;01F470C061A0B9FF3DE248835736E2B85E31C8D6D1844AACAC
so I wanted to ask.

Anyway I'll re read the documents more carefully and return to you back please. Thanks.

[Anticimex]

Encryption is available for both rf24 and rf69 radios. But encryption and signing are two different things, and I work with signing. And signing is more efficient against hackers than encryption. Encryption is more if you care about privacy.

[noelgeorgi]

@Anticimex @hek is it possible to encrypt the data sent over nrf modules using this https://github.com/DavyLandman/AESLib ???

[Anticimex]

@noelgeorgi AES encryption is already supported for both NRF24 and RFM69 radios. See MyConfig.h on the development branch for the flag to use. Doyxgen documentation I link to in this thread on the topic post also contain the personalization instructions for encryption on the development branch.

[noelgeorgi]

@Anticimex said:

@noelgeorgi AES encryption is already supported for both NRF24 and RFM69 radios. See MyConfig.h on the development branch for the flag to use. Doyxgen documentation I link to in this thread on the topic post also contain the personalization instructions for encryption on the development branch.

Thanks for the info.
I'm getting the following errors when compiling securitypersonalizer:

Arduino: 1.6.7 (Linux), Board: "Arduino/Genuino Mega or Mega 2560, ATmega2560 (Mega 2560)"

/home/technoman/Arduino/libraries/MySensors/examples/SecurityPersonalizer/SecurityPersonalizer.ino:83:28: fatal error: sha204_library.h: No such file or directory
 #include <sha204_library.h>
                            ^
compilation terminated.
exit status 1
Error compiling.

  This report would have more information with
  "Show verbose output during compilation"
  enabled in File > Preferences.

doesnt the ATSHA204 library has ATSHA204.h

[Anticimex]

@noelgeorgi master or development branch?

[noelgeorgi]

@Anticimex development branch

[Anticimex]

@noelgeorgi have you made changes to the sketch? Jenkins builds it without problems.

[noelgeorgi]

@Anticimex no, I'm using the sketch from the examples.....:confused:
am i missing some libraries????

[Anticimex]

@noelgeorgi if you have cloned the arduino git you have everything you need. I can build that sketch myself and have used it many times. I suspect you have a problem with your environment if you get compilation errors in it. We continously test the repository and build all examples nightly to make sure it all works as it is supposed to. You can see this at ci.mysensors.org

[noelgeorgi]

@Anticimex sorry for the interruption, i was using rsync to get eveything synced and i might have messed something uop, sha204 library was missing from my libraries folder, now everything works, thanks for the prompt and fast support.

[Anticimex]

:thumbsup:

[TD22057]

@Anticimex - thanks for this. I finally got around to enabling signing on everything while I was testing out my new board design. I followed your schematic from your board design when I built mine and I just went through the instructions to configure the crypto chip and everything went smoothly. Thanks for the work and the good instructions!

[Anticimex]

@TD22057 that's really nice to hear! Are you using a stable release or the development/beta channel?

[TD22057]

@Anticimex
I used the signing sketch on the dev branch - I'm in the process of shifting my stuff over to the dev branch from 1.5 now.

[Anticimex]

Ok, cool. As you might have noticed, personalization has changed a bit on development. Also, whitelisting works slightly differently/better.

[Pierre P]

Isn't blacklisting cool too to use ?
Like, if we know the "name" of the sensor lost, we push it to the black list and voila ? This way, we don't have to put a long list a agreed sensors if we have only two nodes outside the house.
... I think.

[Anticimex]

@Pierre-P because if a node is lost, you no longer control that node. So anyone could reprogram it to have it identify itself in any way possible. We have to assume an attacker has full source code access, so they can rewrite the signing algorithm to use a fake serial as salt for the signature to trick the GW to believe it is a new node. A whitelist mean the attacker has to know the ID/serial of one of the nodes you trust. Which they won't know unless they can get access to that node.

[Pierre P]

Thanks for the complet answer !