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 also uses binary diffing to analyze how TP-LINK recently fixed the vulnerability with a patch.

One week before Christmas

While at a nearby electronics shop looking to buy some gifts, I stumbled upon the TP-LINK Cloud IP Camera NC200 available for €30 (about $33 US), which fit my budget. “Here you go, you found your gift right there!” I thought. But as usual, I could not resist the temptation to open it before Christmas. Of course, I did not buy the camera as a gift after all; I only bought it hoping that I could root the device.

Figure 1: NC200 (Source: http://www.tp-link.com)

binwalk yields this output:

Now we are looking for the CGI, the binary that handles web interface requests generated by the Administrator. We search each of the seven directories for something interesting, and find what we are looking for in /config/conf.d. In the directory, we find configuration files for lighttpd, so we know that the device is using lighttpd, an open-source web server, to serve the web administration interface.

Let’s check its fastcgi.conf configuration:

Let’s check our timer: during the two minutes that have past, we extracted the firmware and found the binary responsible for performing the administrative tasks. What next? We could start looking for common low-hanging fruit found in embedded devices.

The first thing that comes to mind is insecure calls to system. Similar devices commonly rely on system calls to update their configuration. For instance, systemcalls may modify a device’s IP address, hostname, DNS, and so on. Such devices also commonly pass user input to a system call; in the case where the input is either not sanitized or is poorly sanitized, it would be jackpot for us.

While I could use radare2 (http://www.radare.org/r) to reverse engineer the binary, I went instead for IDA(https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/) this time. Analyzing ipcamera, we can see that it indeed imports system and uses it in several places. The good surprise is that TP-LINK did not strip the symbols of their binaries. This means that we already have the names of functions such as pppoeCmdReq_core, which makes it easier to understand the code.

In the Function Name pane on the left (1), we press CTRL+F and search for system. We double-click the desired entry (2) to open its location on the IDA View tab (3). Finally we press ‘x’ when the cursor is on system(4) to show all cross-references (5).

There are many calls and no magic trick to find which are vulnerable. We need to examine each, one by one. I suggest we start analyzing those that seem to correspond to the functions we saw in the web interface. Personally, the pppoeCmdReq_corecaught my eye. The following web page displayed in the ipcamera’s web interface could correspond to that function.

Figure 4: NC200 web interface advanced features

So I started with the pppoeCmdReq_core call.

2)   The result from pppoeFormatCmd is passed to system. That is why I guessed that it must be the formatted PPPoE command. I pressed ‘n’ to rename the variable in IDA to pppoe_cmd.

Timer? In all, four minutes passed since the beginning. Rock on!

Let’s have a look at pppoeFormatCmd. It is a little bit big and not everything it contains is of interest. We’ll first check for the strings referenced inside the function as well as the functions being used. Following is a snippet of pppoeFormatCmd that seemed interesting:

We see two consecutive calls to a function named adapterShell, which takes two parameters:

·      A parameter to adapterShell, which is in fact the user_input from before

We have not yet looked into the function adapterShellitself. First, let’s see what is going on after these two calls:

6)   The clean_password string

Finally in (7), pppoeFormatCmdactually calls sprintf.

Based on this basic analysis, we can understand that when the Admin is setting the username and password for the PPPoE configuration on the web interface, these values are formatted and passed to a system call.

I hope you now understand the basic steps that you can follow when assessing the security of an embedded device. It is my personal preference to analyze the firmware whenever possible, rather than testing the web interface, mostly because less guessing is involved. You can do otherwise of course, and testing the web interface directly would have yielded the same problems.


PS: find advisory for the vulnerability here