From what I gather, valetudo sits between the firmware and the cloud, co-opting cloud functionality and serving that from the vacuum. Since nothing is going to the cloud, only the information stored on the robot, or that you’ve stored yourself, can be used against you. So while your vacuum may have a microphone or camera, it shouldn’t be recording what you say or do anywhere. I have yet to start my valetudo journey and have barely started my robot vacuum journey precisely because of scenarios like this.
I’m not convinced this actually holds. To be able to use Valetudo at all, you at minimum do need to connect it to a wifi network which you are connected to as well on some kind of device. Unless you happen to be setting up some kind of firewalling on the robot vacuum, it is at that point free to start logging whatever information it deems appropriate.
The code is open source. Like any open source software, unless it’s been vetted, you’re relying on trust. The premise is that the software is running on the vacuum, so there is no cloud or remote storage. So, just like anything else self-hosted, unless your network is compromised or you configure it to allow it, nothing external is accessing it. If you don’t trust it, vet it. Read the code or check your network logs.
I’m not talking about the code in Valetudo - I’m talking about the code that’s already running on the robot vacuum before installing Valetudo. It remains on the device after you install Valetudo.
Basically, any concerns about privacy stemming from the original software on the robot vacuum do not get eliminated by installing Valetudo
Valetudo actively blocks the cloud connections. Also, only firmware versions specifically installed with Valetudo is supported (so no chance an update to the original device firmware happens, and does new things).
I think there’s a very low chance something escapes to the vendor cloud.
None the less, I personally run these on a separate VLAN without internet access.
Are you sure about that? It’d be a pretty big feature to implement, and surely it would be something that the Valetudo author would mention in the docs for the project.
It’s just DNS based, and iirc dont require any major effort other than patching the hosts file. Of course it is possible it is not enough, but I have high confidence in the authors after also having watched various talks at I.e DEFCON, that i would be surprised if they missed the firmware doing other nasty things.
This seems to be a model-specific quirk and moreso a side effect of getting Valetudo to work rather than an explicit goal - the same option does not appear in DustBuilder for my model (Roborock S5, still going strong after 941 hours of cleaning time).
I feel like I should check out this DEFCON talk though.
From what I can see, one of two things happens. First, the main cloud communications are intercepted and handled by Valetudo. It replaces the cloud infrastructure with the firmware it adds to the vacuum. Second, some require connectivity to your router or the internet in general. Connections to your router shouldn’t be harmful, and he specifically leaves blocking connections to the internet (which shouldn’t be required for the vacuum to function). I’m only speculating here, but given the open-endedness of the comment I’m guessing explicitly blocking certain connections could be considered an illegal circumvention by laws such as the DMCA. I’d like them to note which vacuums those are so they could be more easily avoided.
Valetudo runs alongside the existing software on the robot vacuum though, does it not?
From what I gather, valetudo sits between the firmware and the cloud, co-opting cloud functionality and serving that from the vacuum. Since nothing is going to the cloud, only the information stored on the robot, or that you’ve stored yourself, can be used against you. So while your vacuum may have a microphone or camera, it shouldn’t be recording what you say or do anywhere. I have yet to start my valetudo journey and have barely started my robot vacuum journey precisely because of scenarios like this.
I’m not convinced this actually holds. To be able to use Valetudo at all, you at minimum do need to connect it to a wifi network which you are connected to as well on some kind of device. Unless you happen to be setting up some kind of firewalling on the robot vacuum, it is at that point free to start logging whatever information it deems appropriate.
The code is open source. Like any open source software, unless it’s been vetted, you’re relying on trust. The premise is that the software is running on the vacuum, so there is no cloud or remote storage. So, just like anything else self-hosted, unless your network is compromised or you configure it to allow it, nothing external is accessing it. If you don’t trust it, vet it. Read the code or check your network logs.
I’m not talking about the code in Valetudo - I’m talking about the code that’s already running on the robot vacuum before installing Valetudo. It remains on the device after you install Valetudo.
Basically, any concerns about privacy stemming from the original software on the robot vacuum do not get eliminated by installing Valetudo
Valetudo actively blocks the cloud connections. Also, only firmware versions specifically installed with Valetudo is supported (so no chance an update to the original device firmware happens, and does new things).
I think there’s a very low chance something escapes to the vendor cloud.
None the less, I personally run these on a separate VLAN without internet access.
Are you sure about that? It’d be a pretty big feature to implement, and surely it would be something that the Valetudo author would mention in the docs for the project.
It’s just DNS based, and iirc dont require any major effort other than patching the hosts file. Of course it is possible it is not enough, but I have high confidence in the authors after also having watched various talks at I.e DEFCON, that i would be surprised if they missed the firmware doing other nasty things.
Patching DNS is specifically possible to enable/disable on the firmware build tool: I.e https://builder.dontvacuum.me/_dreame_r2416.html and the source for that is here https://github.com/dgiese/dustbuilder-script-public/blob/7afed16999711833a8ac0b3b482e935c3ef77219/modifys8image.sh#L169
Interesting.
This seems to be a model-specific quirk and moreso a side effect of getting Valetudo to work rather than an explicit goal - the same option does not appear in DustBuilder for my model (Roborock S5, still going strong after 941 hours of cleaning time).
I feel like I should check out this DEFCON talk though.
I learned something new today, thank you for that
From what I can see, one of two things happens. First, the main cloud communications are intercepted and handled by Valetudo. It replaces the cloud infrastructure with the firmware it adds to the vacuum. Second, some require connectivity to your router or the internet in general. Connections to your router shouldn’t be harmful, and he specifically leaves blocking connections to the internet (which shouldn’t be required for the vacuum to function). I’m only speculating here, but given the open-endedness of the comment I’m guessing explicitly blocking certain connections could be considered an illegal circumvention by laws such as the DMCA. I’d like them to note which vacuums those are so they could be more easily avoided.