Best of…: Best of 2019: The Internship of Things

Did you get some nice shiny new IoT devices for the holidays this year? Hope they weren't the Initech brand. Original --Remy

Mindy was pretty excited to start her internship with Initech's Internet-of-Things division. She'd been hearing at every job fair how IoT was still going to be blowing up in a few years, and how important it would be for her career to have some background in it.

It was a pretty standard internship. Mindy went to meetings, shadowed developers, did some light-but-heavily-supervised changes to the website for controlling your thermostat/camera/refrigerator all in one device.

As part of testing, Mindy created a customer account on the QA environment for the site. She chucked a junk password at it, only to get a message: "Your password must be at least 8 characters long, contain at least three digits, not in sequence, four symbols, at least one space, and end with a letter, and not be more than 10 characters."

"Um, that's quite the password rule," Mindy said to her mentor, Bob.

"Well, you know how it is, most people use one password for every site, and we don't want them to do that here. That way, when our database leaks again, it minimizes the harm."

"Right, but it's not like you're storing the passwords anyway, right?" Mindy said. She knew that even leaked hashes could be dangerous, but good salting/hashing would go a long way.

"Of course we are," Bob said. "We're selling web connected thermostats to what can be charitably called 'twelve-o-clock flashers'. You know what those are, right? Every clock in their house is flashing twelve?" Bob sneered. "They can't figure out the site, so we often have to log into their account to fix the things they break."

A few days later, Initech was ready to push a firmware update to all of the Model Q baby monitor cameras. Mindy was invited to watch the process so she could understand their workflow. It started off pretty reasonable: their CI/CD system had a verified build, signed off, ready to deploy.

"So, we've got a deployment farm running in the cloud," Bob explained. "There are thousands of these devices, right? So we start by putting the binary up in an S3 bucket." Bob typed a few commands to upload the binary. "What's really important for our process is that it follows this naming convention. Because the next thing we're going to do is spin up a half dozen EC2 instances- virtual servers in the cloud."

A few more commands later, and then Bob had six sessions open to cloud servers in tmux. "Now, these servers are 'clean instances', so the very first thing I have to do is upload our SSH keys." Bob ran an ssh-copy-id command to copy the SSH key from his computer up to the six cloud VMs.

"Wait, you're using your personal SSH keys?"

"No, that'd be crazy!" Bob said. "There's one global key for every one of our Model Q cameras. We've all got a copy of it on our laptops."

"All" the developers?"

"Everybody on the team," Bob said. "Developers to management."

"On their laptops?"

"Well, we were worried about storing something so sensitive on the network."

Bob continued the process, which involved launching a script that would query a webservice to see which Model Q cameras were online, then sshing into them, having them curl down the latest firmware, and then self-update. "For the first few days, we leave all six VMs running, but once most of them have gotten the update, we'll just leave one cloud service running," Bob explained. "Helps us manage costs."

It's safe to say Mindy learned a lot during her internship. Mostly, she learned, "don't buy anything from Initech."

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