Privacy

31982 readers

140 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

168

Ah yes, smart lights need Tor. (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago by errorlab@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

41 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have this old TP-Link smart lightbulb, it’s the only thing that’s IoT and on WiFi in my house.

Looking through pfBlocker logs for fun, and noticed it’s been trying to connect to the Tor network.

Oh! Also, it’s been uploading and downloading 100+ MB of data a day.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Auzy@beehaw.org 38 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Egh.. More bad info. Seems to be prolific here on Lemmy

And yeah, definitely not Tor (I happen to know the TPLink KASA HS100 protocol too). The chip running on them wouldn't even have sufficient resources to run tor more likely lol

Plus, as others have said, port 123 is NTP

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ok, it's not Tor, but why would it generate 100 MB of NTP traffic every day?

[–] Auzy@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

How do you know it is? Dpi is often wrong about both protocol. And size

123 isn't the normal protocol though, so let's assume it is malicious (I will admit I could be wrong here). Packet dumps is the way to prove it. If op posts packet dumps, that would be useful (as I could be wrong, the normal protocol is a different port generally though).

Also, important to note that if they're uk hs100 plugs, they have different firmware too.. The UK ones have one of the protocols shut off

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How do you know it is? Dpi is often wrong about both protocol.

I didn't mean to say that. My point wanted to be that it is a bit too much traffic for it to be honest NTP traffic (as it was assumed above), unless the program sending it has a honest bug

[–] Auzy@beehaw.org 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Dpi on these cheap routers sometimes often doesn't even calculate the data downloaded correctly. Ie, we can't even rely on the 100mb figure

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 9 months ago

I'm a little confused. Why do you think this is a cheap router?
As I know pfBlocker is a component of the pfSense firewall OS, and if OP runs that on their router, it must almost certainly be an x86 machine and have much more RAM than the amount that cheap routers have, according to the minimum reqs.