LIVESTREAM: Breaking an IoT Device’s Authentication and Integrity Verification Mechanism

Starting vulnerability research in embedded elctronics.

Abstract:

Attacking IoT devices often presents unique and unexpected challenges for hackers to overcome before full-fledged testing can commence. In this livestream, Ian Sindermann will break down one such challenge and provide an in-depth walk-through of how we overcame it. The challenge is that of dealing with a very strict authentication and integrity verification mechanism on a NAS device. This mechanism prevents message modification, thwarting most automated and manual vulnerability research tasks. As such, we need to break it before we can move forward with our evaluation of the system.

We will cover many things during this steam such as the following: our general assessment workflow; reverse-engineering the client’s JavaScript code; writing a Python utility to sign arbitrary messages; extending Burp suite with our signing utility, and finally reaping the rewards by exploiting identified vulnerabilities.

Bio:

Ian Sindermann is an Associate Security Analyst at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), where he conducts rigorous security assessments of various computer hardware and software products. With a primarily self-taught education and prior experience as a wannabe sysadmin, his background lies in web application security, IoT devices, and *NIX systems. Insatiable curiosity has led to a variety of other interests including mainframes, legacy systems, hardware hacking, and whatever tech obscurities he can get his hands on.