How Updates Work When There Is No Cloud

Most devices you own today update themselves. They check in with a company server, download whatever that company decided to ship, and install it, sometimes overnight and sometimes without asking. It's convenient. It also means the company can change your device whenever it likes, and your device has to keep talking to that company to do it.

Alias is built not to need a cloud. So we had to think hard about updates. Here's how we're designing them.

The goals

• Nothing phones home. Your devices shouldn't need to check in with us to keep working or to get fixes.
• You decide when. No surprise installs. An update happens when you choose to apply it.
• You can trust what you install. Every update should be provably from us and provably unaltered.

How it works

Updates will be published as signed releases. A signature is a cryptographic seal that only we can create, and any device can check. If a single byte of the file has been changed, by a bad actor or by a corrupted download, the signature won't match and the device will refuse it.

You download the update once, from our updates page, onto a computer you control. From there it goes to Homebase, and Homebase hands it to the Rogues and Repeaters on your property when you tell it to. Each device checks the signature itself before installing anything. Rogue is also designed with secure boot, so it will only start software that carries a valid signature.

At no point does a Rogue need to reach the internet. The only device that ever touches the download is the one you chose to use.

What about devices that are far away?

A Repeater on a ridge or a Rogue out on a job site shouldn't have to come back to the house for an update. This is one of the harder parts, because LoRa is built for small messages, not big files. We'll share how we're handling it once it's tested. Either way, you'll be able to update any device by hand.

What's still being worked out

We're still deciding exactly how you'll prove you own a device when you download an update, and we want that to involve as little personal information as possible. We'd rather ask for nothing at all than build another account system that collects data it doesn't need. When that's settled, we'll explain it here.

Updates are where a lot of quiet data collection happens in the industry. We'd like ours to be the opposite: you get the fix, you check it's real, you install it when you're ready, and nobody logs that you did.