Got 15 minutes to kill? Why not root your Christmas gift?
TP-LINK NC200 and NC220 Cloud IP Cameras, which promise to let consumers “see there, when you can’t be there,” are vulnerable to an OS command injection in the PPPoE username and password settings. An attacker can leverage this weakness to get a remote shell with root privileges. The cameras are being marketed for surveillance, baby monitoring, pet monitoring, and monitoring of seniors. This blog post provides a 101 introduction to embedded hacking and covers how to extract and analyze firmware to look for common low-hanging fruit in security. This post…
Hacking a counterfeit money detector for fun and non-profit
In Spain we have a saying “Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa” which basically means there will always be a way to circumvent a restriction. In fact, that is pretty much what hacking is all about. It seems the idea of ‘counterfeiting’ appeared at the same time as legitimate money. The Wikipedia page for Counterfeit money is a fascinating read that helps explain its effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money Nowadays every physical currency implements security measures to prevent counterfeiting. Some counterfeits can be detected with a naked eye,…
Emulating binaries to discover vulnerabilities in industrial devices
Emulating an industrial device in a controlled environment is a really helpful security tool. You can gain a better knowledge of how it works, identify potential attack vectors, and verify the vulnerabilities you discovered using static methods. This post provides step-by-step instructions on how to emulate an industrial router with publicly available firmware. This is a pretty common case, so you should be able to apply this methodology to other scenarios. The target is the Waveline family of industrial routers from the German automation vendor Weidmüller. The firmware…
Industrial Device Firmware Can Reveal FTP Treasures!
Security professionals are becoming more aware of backdoors, security bugs, certificates, and similar bugs within ICS device firmware. I want to highlight another bug that is common in the firmware for critical industrial devices: the remote access provided by some vendors between their devices and ftp servers for troubleshooting or testing. In many cases this remote access could allow an attacker to compromise the device itself, the company the device belongs to, or even the entire vendor organization. I discovered this vulnerability while tracking connectivity test functions within the firmware…
Identify Backdoors in Firmware By Using Automatic String Analysis
The Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) this Friday published an advisory about some backdoors I found in two programmable gateways from TURCK, a leading German manufacturer of industrial automation products. http://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-13-136-01 Using hard-coded account credentials in industrial devices is a bad idea. I can understand the temptation among manufacturers to include a backdoor “support” mechanism in the firmware for a product such as this. This backdoor allows them to troubleshoot problems remotely with minimal inconvenience to the customer. On the other hand, it is only a…
Behind ADSL Lines: How to Bankrupt ISPs While Making Money
Disclaimer: No businesses or even the Internet were harmed while researching this post. We will explore how an attacker can control the Internet access of one or more ISPs or countries through ordinary routers and Internet modems. Cyber-attacks are hardly new in 2013. But what if an attack is both incredibly easy to construct and yet persistent enough to shut Internet services down for a few hours or even days? In this blog post we will talk about how easy it would be to enlist ordinary home Internet connections in…
Solving a Little Mystery
Firmware analysis is a fascinating area within the vast world of reverse engineering, although not very extended. Sometimes you end up in an impasse until noticing a minor (or major) detail you initially overlooked. That’s why sharing methods and findings is a great way to advance into this field. While looking for certain information during a session of reversing, I came across this great post. There is little to add except for solving the ‘mystery’ behind that simple filesystem and mentioning a couple of technical details. This…