Agreeing on a session key is important, because it ensures that no one else on the network can snoop on the Wi-Fi and Tapo passwords when they are subsequently sent from the Tapo app to what it thinks is a Tapo light bulb.
But having no verification process for the key agreement itself is a bit like connecting to a website over HTTPS, and then not bothering to perform even the most basic check on the web certificate that it sends back: your traffic will be secure in transit, but could nevertheless be going straight into the hands of a crook.
The Tapo app identifies itself to the light bulb (or what it thinks is a light bulb) by sending it an RSA public key, which the other end uses to encrypt a randomly generated AES key to secure the data exchanged during the session.
The combined outcome of these two flaws is that an attacker on your network could first convince you that their rogue access point was a genuine light bulb waiting to be configured, and thus lure you to the wrong place, and then convince you to to send it an encrypted copy of your own Wi-Fi and Tapo passwords.
If every light on and light off request came out identically, then once an attacker had guessed what a turn it off packet looked like, they could not only recognise those packets in future without decrypting them, but also replay those same packets without needing to know how to encrypt them in the first place.
The TP-Link coders, unfortunately, generated an IV at the same time that they created their AES session key, and then used the same IV over and over again for every subsequent data packet, even when previous data was repeated exactly.
The last cryptographic problem that the researchers found is one that could still harm security even if the initialisation vector problem were fixed, namely that old messages, whether an attacker knows what they mean or not, can be played back later as if they were new.
Like the date on a train ticket that will give you away if you try to use it two days in a row, even if the ticket itself never gets cancelled by a ticket machine or punched by a ticket inspector, sequence numbers and timestamps in data packets serve two important purposes.
Amanda Shires is known for her folksy, Americana sound. In 2017, Shires was named the Americana Music Association's Emerging Artist of the Year and she frequently lends her voice and style to her husband Jason Isbell's band, The 400 Unit. But her new solo record, To the Sunset, moves away from her normal style, taking on more pop sounds with crunched guitars and layered vocals.
Shires came to NPR in Washington, D.C. to perform songs from the new album and talk to NPR's Don Gonyea about the stories behind them, as well as about being a woman in country music and new motherhood.
Don Gonyea: I've seen you quoted as saying that women in country music, and even in Americana music, are expected to sound a certain way. Maybe sad, wistful songs. You walked down the Country Music Association red carpet in 2017 wearing a T-shirt that read, "Mama wants to change that Nashville sound." Is the musical style on this album your way of trying to make that change and defy those expectations?
One song that really sticks in my head especially the guitar and your vocals, it's one that really seems to embody this very progressive sound that you've got in this record is called "Eve's Daughter."
It's a trip. You know when you have a child and then as you get older, your parents start becoming more like your friends and then telling you things they wouldn't have told you when you were 14 or 15, answering questions about the past or whatever. And when my daughter was born, we talk about a lot of stuff because motherhood is a guilt-ridden situation. I go all around, and I leave her, so I talk about it all the time with her. She was telling me about her own mother abandoning her, like for good, so I wasn't doing a bad thing, really, just going working and making it OK for her to want to make those choices if she gets older to be able to do what she wants to do and feel OK with it.
The other day [my daughter] was sitting at the breakfast table and I was sitting there with her and she was like, "Get up!" I thought something was wrong, like I don't know what it could have been. But then she said, "You're sitting on me shadow." That's pretty cool. That's a good line. I'll keep it.
Charms can really be anything, but I did refer to a bracelet in the song. I don't want to give away all the secrets is what I'm trying to tell you. Because the beauty of songs, I think, is if you do it right a lot of people can relate to it in their own way and make their own meaning out of things. And so, I don't want to give away the secrets and ruin somebody's idea of what the song is to them.
Title pretty much explains it all: are daily login rewards going away in Secret of the Obscure? I know some people think that they are, but I don't really see why they would. I've heard the argument that it's pay-to-win to have multiple accounts for the daily login, but we can literally buy gems that directly convert to gold. At this moment, assuming you were to purchase just the HoT and PoF bundle on sale, it takes about 10 months of logging in daily to get the same amount of gold as just buying the gems and converting them.
You dont need any of the expansions for multiboxing accounts to work..heroic editions are enough to get the access to log in rewards, and those are either given away for free or bought for Next to nothing when its on sale (30cents per account).. literally NOONE is buying any of the expansion bundless if we are talking about hundreds or thousands accounts farms..
Well, because ANet screwed up the nVidia GeForce NOW promo last year, anyone who wanted hundreds of completely free heroic editions got them back then. If I remember correctly ANet didn't sell any heroic editions for other companies' promotions or gave them away themselves since then. That botched promo is also pretty much the reason why MCs and T3/T4 mats halved in value during the last 15 - 18 months.
However, using more than 30 accounts per day requires a bit of planning and organization (NVMe drive, nVidia GPU, VPN, etc.). Although a somewhat skilled login-farmer can easily log into 100 - 150 accounts per hour without any automation. The gold-per-hour rate is absolutely insane turning any other method of farming into a joke. If one uses scripts or bots, one can basically double that login-rate per PC, although it seems that ANet banned some of those login-botters lately.
Personally, as someone with a far above average amount of accounts, I'm all for cutting down the basic login rewards to stuff that can't be monetized. ANet should at least try to balance between heroic editions and accounts with multiple expansions, if they decide that they won't get rid of rewards that can be converted into gold easily.
You are wrong, the login-reward is supposed to reward players for logging into the game, hence the name. It's a fairly simple psychological trick that almost every F2P, Fremium or mobile game uses to condition the player to come back to the game. They aren't supposed to be part of the daily grind as you suggested.
The problem with the current system is that there is a direct way to convert the login-rewards into gold. Once that is removed, GW2's economy would be less skewed and people would actually have to play the game to make gold (or buy gems instead).
I assume that the new Wizard's Vault is supposed to be an incentive for players to actually play the game instead of just gaming a flawed system. The question will just be whether it is put atop the current flawed system or if it replaces it.
In the grand scheme of things, players owning multiple accounts doesn't create any negative problems for the game. Unless it's a significant amount of gold, it really doesn't matter for the in-game economy whether the gold comes from logging on every day on multiple accounts, or by farming something repeatedly on a single account.
Judging solely by the wording they chose there, it seems they want to combine the login and daily systems and the upcoming vault feature will be available to everyone, even people who don't have SotO on their account. Those two things together seem to indicate dailies and login rewards will be removed and replaced by the Wizard Vault, with additional dailies and such being available to people who do buy SotO, similar to how we have dailies in living world maps and other expansion areas in addition to core game locations.
Probably you'll log in and get some Astral Acclaim currency (or some other minor reward), then you'll get tasks that let you earn a bit more Astral Acclaim - essentially your log-in reward is likely to be account-bound currency instead of items. When you have enough currency, you'll then be able to buy stuff from the Vault with the reward pool refreshing on a quarterly basis.
So yeah, I'd say it looks like daily login rewards are going to turn into/be replaced by the Wizard's Vault. Could be a nerf, or could feel all right; we won't know til it gets here.