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Comment on UK law will hit smart home device makers with fines for using default passwords

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If you forget your password to an IoT device, and the paper label on it wore off, is it now mandatory for it to be permanently bricked and instant e-waste?

Not necessarily, you could have a bootstrap operation where pressing a reset button, allows you to pass a public key to the device, which it will use to send back an encrypted new random username/password combo, which you could then log in with.

A lot more convoluted, but you could make a nice CompanyNameDeviceSetup app, which could handle the minutiae.

I think that any device which has this problem is basically bricked, from the average user's point of view. Most IoT gear just isn't worth the effort to try to fix.

The only (partial) solution I can imagine is someone creating an open-source software for resetting the password to a non-standard setting, then evangelizing the standard. There are a few issues with this, and it would require adding some standard interface (USB or other) to every such device.

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