Hacking ISPs with Point-to-Pwn Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE)

Presented at DEF CON 30 (2022), Aug. 12, 2022, 4 p.m. (45 minutes)

Hello, my name is BWL-X8620, and I'm a SOHO router. For many years my fellow SOHO routers and I were victims of endless abuse by hackers. Default credentials, command injections, file uploading - you name it. And it is all just because we're WAN-facing devices. Just because our ISP leaves our web server internet-facing makes hackers think it's okay to attack and make us zombies. But today, I say NO MORE! In this talk, I will show that if a web client can attack a web server, then an ISP client can attack the ISP servers! I will reveal a hidden attack surface and vulnerabilities in popular network equipment used by ISPs worldwide to connect end-users to the internet. BRAS devices are not that different from us SOHO routers. No one is infallible. But, BRAS devices can support up to 256,000 subscribers, and exploiting them can cause a ruckus. Code executing can lead to a total ISP compromise, mass client DNS poisoning, end-points RCE, and more! This talk will present a high severity logical DOS vulnerability in a telecommunications vendor implementation of PPPoE and a critical RCE vulnerability in PPP. That means we, the SOHO routers, can attack and execute code on the ISP's that connect us to the internet! Today we are fighting back!

Presenters:

  • Gal Zror - Vulnerability Research Manager at CyberArk Labs
    Gal Zror (@waveburst) acts as the vulnerability research manager in CyberArk labs. Gal has over 12 years of experience in vulnerability research and he specializes in embedded systems and protocols. Besides research, he is also an amateur boxer and a tiki culture enthusiastic.

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