Last Friday, thousands of owners of Samsung Blu Ray players found that their home entertainment devices would no longer boot up. While devices getting stuck in a power-cycling loop is not uncommon, this case stands out as it affected a huge range of devices all at the same time. Samsung’s support forum paints a bleak picture, with one thread on the issue stretching to 177 pages in just a week.
So what is going on, and what can be done to fix the problem? There’s a lot of conflicting information on that. Some people’s gear has started working again, others have not and there are reports of customers being told to seek in-person repair service. Let’s dive in with some wild speculation on the problem and circle back by commiserating about the woes of web-connected appliances.
Time To Die
When thousands of devices all fail at the same time, it tends to point to an external causal factor. One theory put forth by many has been that the issue was caused by an automatic firmware update, bricking the machines. However, with the problem affecting a wide cross section of machines, all presumably running different hardware and different firmware, this would seem an unlikely cause. While firmware updates can cause problems, it would be unusual for Samsung to roll out an update to so many varied models all on the same day. A staggered rollout as fixes were developed would be more likely, particularly for a product line facing end of life, like Blu Ray players.
A more likely culprit is an expired SSL certificate which the players use to access Samsung servers. With Samsung’s Blu Ray players often featuring Internet connectivity for streaming video, such certificates are necessary to avoid security issues out in the real world. If not kept up to date, these certificates eventually expire, and need to be updated if secure connections are to be maintained.
Of course, if expired certificates are the problem, it highlights far deeper issues with Samsung’s appliances. While an expired certificate cannot be used for secure online communication, there is no reason that it should brick the entire device. A simple few lines of code are all that is required to detect the out-of-date certificate and notify the user as to the cause of the problem. The player could then allow the user to still use the offline functionality of the device. Instead, what users see is a machine that fails within 10 seconds of power on, getting stuck in an infinite loop.
The fact that the problem is affecting even devices that aren’t connected to the Internet will prove yet more galling for Samsung’s customers. While a certificate failure is a problem for online use, there’s no reason it should affect the proper operation of the …read more
Source:: Hackaday