Responsible disclosure practices

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

Not really true. Locking a door doesn't prevent someone from breaking in, but it does deter. Putting a bomb shelter door on a house with windows doesn't make it safe. It just makes it really hard to enter and leave the house.

Exactly. When I said the control system, I was specifically referring to the DS -> Robot communications not being authenticated/encrypted. The FMS/etc is a separate matter that I have zero knowledge of. Given that the game is judged by humans watching every move a robot does, it doesn't make sense to bother with encryption/authentication at that point (see the reference to Raymond's airtight hatchway that MrRoboSteve mentioned). Anyone performing an attack as I mentioned previously would almost certainly be noticed.

If I had thought there was a risk of someone cheating using the method I mentioned, then I would have sent an email to FIRST long ago, and wouldn't have mentioned it in a public forum. But the risk is minimal, the gain is minimal except in very subtle circumstances, and the downside from it is too great as MrRoboSteve mentions.

I'm not convinced that speculating in a public forum on the ways one could cheat is necessarily a bad thing either. The more ways that are publicly known, the more they will be watched for, and the harder it will be to actually do any of them -- which is a good thing.

I suspect if people intentionally cheat in FIRST, they almost certainly do it via some mechanical cheating mechanism or violation of materials rules. I stand by my assertion that cheating via software that only affects your robot in a non-mechanical way is mostly useless. [Edit: with the exception of methods that provide human input to autonomous mode, but even then, mostly useless in this year's game]