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[This is a guest diary submitted by Xavier Mertens] Our houses and offices are more and more infested by electronic devices embedding a real computer with an operating system and storage. They are connected to network resources for remote management, statistics or data polling. This is called the "Internet of Things" or "IoT". My home network is hardened and any new (unknown) device connected to it receives an IP address from a specific range which has no connectivity with other hosts or the Internet but its packets are logged. The goal is to detect suspicious activity like data leaks or unexpected firmware updates. The last toy I bought yesterday is a Smart Plug from Supra-Electronics. This device allows you to control a power plug via your mobile device and calculate the energy consumption with nice stats. I had a very good opportunity to buy one for a very low price (25€). Let's see what's inside....
Immediately after the boot sequence, the device started to try to communicate with remote hosts: I grabbed a copy of the RDTServer binary (Mips) and using the "strings" command against the file revealed interesting stuff. The IP addresses used were found in the binary:
In fact, the IOTC platform is a service developed by ThoughTek to establish P2P communications between devices. I read the documentation provided with the device as well as all the website pages and there is no mention of this service. Manufacturers should include some technical documentation about the network requirements (ex: to download firmware updates). In this case, it's not a major security issue but this story enforces what we already know (and be afraid) about IoT: those devices have weak configuration and they lack of visibility/documentation about their behavior. Take care when connecting them on your network. A best practice is to inspect the traffic they generate once online (DNS requests, HTTP(S) request or any other protocol).
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Johannes 3220 Posts ISC Handler |
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Jan 12th 2015 3 years ago |
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After a brief look at this product (and similar things), I'm inclined to disagree with:
"In this case, it's not a major security issue..." Poor/weak default configuration + Internet connection + mobile apps + remote control + electricity supply This spells "trouble" to me, if only from an availability perspective. Might only be mildly annoying if your TV is switched off at random, but slightly more worrying if your home dialysis machine is... |
Peter Bance 9 Posts Posts |
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Jan 12th 2015 3 years ago |
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It could become an issue indeed but this kind of device looks definitively not reliable to handle business critical power supplies!
I'm currently investigating the solution developed by ThoughtTek... I'm sure that the system has weaknesses! /x |
Xme 370 Posts Posts ISC Handler |
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Jan 12th 2015 3 years ago |
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Could be *EXTREMELY* worrying!
Many years ago (early 1980's) I was involved in early work on energy management and "smart home" stuff. I pointed out that if an attacker could gain control over the server that sent commands to the devices in a locality, he could synchronously turn *MANY* devices on and off together, creating an electrical surge that would DoS the electrical system. If such an attach were coordinated to occur in many localities at once, it could bring down a large part of the national electrical grid. The response from management? "Don't tell anybody." So if these devices are being surrepticiously controlled from an potential agressor nation (China), all they have to do is sell enough of them (making money all the while) until they have critical mass, then launch an attack. This is a case of a p[hysical Trojan Hourse, only it is not a gift; the victim pays for it. |
Moriah 133 Posts Posts |
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Jan 13th 2015 3 years ago |
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Interesting article.
I own a nest but I have blocked its access to the internet. so basically its useless for all the cool online control. I'm curious to know what is the software you are using to view the logs of your device in the attached screenshot? |
XORed 2 Posts Posts |
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Jan 13th 2015 3 years ago |
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To my eye, that looks like Kibana, so he's probably running an ELK (Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana) stack with a parser written to eat firewall logs and drop them in ElasticSearch, then visualizing with Kibana.
I've been meaning to do that for my pfsense logs at home for a while, but it's hard to find the time. |
Mark 2 Posts Posts |
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Jan 17th 2015 3 years ago |
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Hello,
Take a look on my git, we've find lot of thing about this plug : https://github.com/supermat/SmartPlug You can find others information here : http://www.dealabs.com/bons-plans/prise-wifi-/85521?page=49 Its in french. The china access is probably for the "cloud" access. Without any router configuration, the plug can be Turn on or off in 3G network With the iOS/androïd application. |
Anonymous Posts |
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Feb 13th 2015 3 years ago |
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I recently bought a QIHAN Dvr, Chineese brand obviously. I noticed a very suspicious outgoing traffic from the Dvr to the following IPs - 188.213.172.33 - Italy, ARUBA-NET, Aruba S.p.A. - Dedicate server Farm2, 101.200.83.161 - China, ALISOFT, Aliyun Computing Co., LTD and 203.195.157.36 - Beijing, China, TencentCloud, Tencent cloud computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
This is at lest a little disturbing and suspicious. I blocked this ips at my router's side using iptables. This is not connected to ddns or something like that becaouse everything works fine. There are a lot of huge security vulnerabilities in these dvr, staring from activex which is used for web management, weak passwords and who knows what else. |
Anonymous Posts |
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Oct 24th 2016 1 year ago |
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