For a period of time it was popular for the industrial designers I knew to try to launch their own Kickstarters. Their belief was that engineering was a commodity that they could hire out to the lowest bidder after they got the money. The product design and marketing (their specialty) was the real value. All of their projects either failed or cost them more money than they brought in because engineering was harder than they thought.

I think we’re in for another round of this now that LLMs give the impression that the software and firmware parts are basically free. All of those project ideas people had previously that were shelved because software is hard are getting another look from people who think they’re just going to prompt Claude until the product looks like it works.

I believe there was some good that came from last months decision to be more open to what apps and data can say without going through huge regulatory processes (though because we apply auditory stimulation, this doesn't apply to us), however, there should be at least regulatory requirements for data security.

We've developed all of our algorithms and processing to happen on device, which is required anyway due to the latency which would result from bluetooth connections, but even the data sent to the server is all encrypted. I'd think that would be the basics. How do you trust a company with monitoring, and apparently providing stimulation, if they don't take these simple steps?

Like, don't actually do it, but I feel like there's inspiration for a sci-fi novel or short story there.

I have deployed open MQTT to the world for quick prototypes on non personal (and healthcare) data. Once my cloud provider told me to stop because they didn’t like it, that could be used for relay DDOS attacks.

I would not trust the sleep mask company even if they somehow manage to have some authentication and authorisation on their MQTT.

The difference is when it's a sleep mask, someone reads your brainwaves. When it's a cloud credential, someone reads your customer database. Per-device or per-environment credential provisioning isn't even hard anymore. AWS has IAM roles, IoT has device certificates, MQTT has client certs and topic ACLs. The tooling exists. Companies skip it because key management adds a step to the assembly line and nobody budgets time for security architecture on v1.

Almost out of a Phillip K Dick novel

Lowering the skills bar needed to reverse engineer at this level could have its own AI-related implications.

What's the real risk profile? Robbers can see you are asleep instead of waiting until you aren't home?

I have not implemented MQTT automations myself, but it's there a way to encrypt them? That could be a nice to have

"The ZZZ mask is an intelligent sleep mask — it allows you to sleep less while sleeping deeper. That’s the premise — but really it is a paradigm breaking computer that allows full automation and control over the sleep process, including access to dreamtime."

or if this is another scifi variation of the same theme, with some dev like embellishments.

Also discovered during reverse-engineering of the devices’ communications protocols.

IoT device security is an utterly shambolic mess.

I find it difficult to believe that a sleep mask exists with the features listed: "EEG brain monitoring, electrical muscle stimulation around the eyes, vibration, heating, audio." while also being something you can strap to your face and comfortably sleep in, with battery capacity sufficient for several hours of sleep.

I also wonder how Claude probed bluetooth. Does Claude have access to bluetooth interface? Why? Perhaps it wrote a secondary program then ran that, but the article describes it as Claude probing directly.

I'm also skeptical of Claude's ability to make accurate reverse-engineered bluetooth protocol. This is at least a little more of an LLM-appropriate task, but I suspect that there was a lot of chaff also produced that the article writer separated from the wheat.

If any of this happened at all. No hardware mentioned, no company, no actual protocol description published, no library provided.

It makes a nice vague futuristic cyperpunk story, but there's no meat on those bones.

Amazing.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dis...

Then there's hardening your peripheral and central device/app against the kinds of spoofing attacks that are described in this blog post.

If your peripheral and central device can securely [0] store key material, then (in addition to the standard security features that come with the Bluetooth protocol) one may implement mutual authentication between the central and peripheral devices and, optionally, encryption of the data that is transmitted across that connection.

Then, as long as your peripheral and central devices are programmed to only ever respond when presented with signatures that can be verified by a trusted public key, the spoofing and probing demonstrated here simply won't work (unless somebody reverse engineers the app running on the central device to change its behaviour after the signature verification has been performed).

To protect against that, you'd have to introduce server-mediated authorisation. On Android, that would require things like the Play Integrity API and app signatures. Then, if the server verifies that the instance of the app running on the central device is unmodified, it can issue a token that the central device can send to the peripheral for verification in addition to the signatures from the previous step.

Alternatively, you could also have the server generate the actual command frames that the central device sends to the peripheral. The server would provide the raw command frame and the command frame signed with its own key, which can be verified by the peripheral.

I guess I got a bit carried away here. Certainly, not every peripheral needs that level of security. But, into which category this device falls, I'm not sure. On the one hand, it's not a security device, like an electronic door lock. And on the other hand, it's a very personal peripheral with some unusual capabilities like the electrical muscle stimulation gizmo and the room occupancy sensor.

[0]: Like with the Android KeyStore and whichever HSMs are used in microcontrollers, so that keys can't be extracted by just dumping strings from a binary.

Dudes so stupid being tied to tech everywhere.

Coward. The only way to challenge this garbage is "Name and Shame". Light a fire under their asses. That fire can encourage them to do right, and as a warning to all other companies.

My guess is this is Luuna https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flowtimebraintag/luuna