Presented at
DEF CON 30 (2022),
Aug. 12, 2022, 3 p.m.
(45 minutes)
In this presentation, we go over the main challenges we faced during our analysis of the top selling router in a local eCommerce, and how we found a zero-click remote unauthenticated RCE vulnerability. We will do a walkthrough on how we located the root cause of this vulnerability and found that it was ingrained in Realtek’s implementation of a networking functionality in its SDK for eCos devices.
We then present the method we used to automate the detection of this vulnerability in other firmware images. We reflect on the fact that on most routers this functionality is not even documented and can’t be disabled via the router’s web interface. We take this as an example of the hidden attack surface that lurks in OEM internet-connected devices.
We conclude by discussing why this vulnerability hasn’t been reported yet, despite being easy to spot (having no prior IoT experience), widespread (affecting multiple devices from different vendors), and critical.
Our research highlights the poor state of firmware security, where vulnerable code introduced down the supply chain might never get reviewed and end up having a great impact, evidencing that security is not a priority for the vendors and opening the possibility for attackers to find high impact bugs with low investment and little prior knowledge.
Presenters:
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Octavio Gianatiempo
- Security Researcher at Faraday
Octavio Gianatiempo is a Security Researcher at Faraday and a Computer Science student at the University of Buenos Aires. He's also a biologist with research experience in molecular biology and neuroscience. The necessity of analyzing complex biological data was his point of entry into programming. But he wanted to achieve a deeper understanding of how computers work, so he enrolled in Computer Science. An entry-level CTF introduced him to the world of computer security, and there he won his first ticket to a security conference. This event was a point of no return, after which he began taking classes on computer architecture and organization and operating systems to deepen his low-level knowledge. As a Security Researcher at Faraday, he focuses on reverse engineering and fuzzing open and closed source software to find new vulnerabilities and exploit them.
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Octavio Galland
- Security Researcher at Faraday
Octavio Galland is a computer science student at Universidad de Buenos Aires and a security researcher at Faraday. His main topics of interest include taking part in CTFs, fuzzing open-source software and binary reverse engineering/exploitation (mostly on x86/amd64 and MIPS).
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