In 1993, first-person shooter Doom was a groundbreaking game. In 2014, it’s being used by ethical hackers to demonstrate security vulnerabilities in connected devices.

Specifically: printers. During his talk at the 44Con conference in London, Michael Jordon from Context Information Security proved he could easily compromise the Canon PIXMA printer – popular for homes and small businesses alike – by making it run Doom.

From the exploitation standpoint, hacking the machine was trivial, as Jordon discovered that the device has a web interface with no username or password protecting it.

On initial inspection, this interface was of little interest, only showing ink levels and printing status. But it soon became apparent a hacker could use this interface to trigger an update to the machine’s firmware - the underlying code that is essentially the heart and soul of the printer.

An outsider could thus have changed settings on the printer to convince it to ask for updates from a malicious server rather than Canon’s official channel.

Jordon took advantage of what he described as “terrible” encryption protecting the firmware to add some tweaks to its code, enabling him to control the machine from afar.

A malicious hacker could have discovered what documents the printer was handling, or started issuing commands to take up resources. If it belonged to a business, they would also have had access to the network, on which to carry out further exploitation.

Doom? Jordon used the first-person shooter as the basis for his presentation to the white-hat hacker audience at 44Con, to make it more interesting. The graphics may have been slightly dodgy, but the game running on the Canon PIXMA was still, definably, Doom.

The point of the project was to prove that machines most would not normally expect to be hacked can be valuable to those looking to breach networks.

“If you can run Doom on a printer, you can do a lot more nasty things,” Jordon told the Guardian. “In a corporate environment, it would be a good place to be. Who suspects printers?”



Canon has promised a fix, after working closely with Context. “We intend to provide a fix as quickly as is feasible,” the company said.

“All PIXMA products launching from now onwards will have a username/password added to the PIXMA web interface, and models launched from the second half of 2013 onwards will also receive this update, models launched prior to this time are unaffected. This action will resolve the issue uncovered by Context.”

Context has been exposing various flaws found in unexpected places over recent months. It has previously shown how to hack into an internet-connected toy bunny, a smart light bulb and an IP camera to prove such vulnerabilities were easily hackable.

Jordon doesn’t believe manufacturers of such “smart” technologies are giving enough attention to security. “The maturity isn’t there,” Jordon added.

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