IoT on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

Disclosure: Command Injection in Geutebrück Cameras

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

During a penetration test for a customer, we identified a command injection vulnerability in Geutebrück security cameras that allows authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands as root through the web interface. The root cause is unsanitized user input being passed into a sed script (and at least 12 other CGI endpoints). In addition to the injection, we identified an XSS vulnerability, an exposed system menu leaking configuration and log data, and an insecure GET-parameter-to-environment-variable mapping that enables abuse of variables like LD_PRELOAD and LD_DEBUG. We reported the findings to Geutebrück and a patched firmware was provided. This post walks through how we got from a sed error message to a root shell.

Hacking a Bluetooth Printer Server: GATT to UART Adapter?

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post describes the journey of how we discovered an interesting Bluetooth SoC within the Datong NP330, a Printer Server IoT device. Our initial goal was to reverse-engineer and analyze the Bluetooth controller that is included in the device. So we wanted to be able to dump the firmware or, if possible, get shell access on the printer server. During that journey we found a few vulnerabilities that ultimately let an attacker fully compromise the device. This is possible over Bluetooth or network via unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges.

Part I: Bluetooth Auracast from a Security Researcher’s Perspective

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Auracast, the new Bluetooth LE Broadcast Audio feature has gained some publicity in the past months. The Bluetooth SIG has introduced the LE Audio feature-set to the Bluetooth 5.2 Specification in 2019 and vendors are only now starting to implement it. Auracast facilitates broadcasting audio over Bluetooth LE to a potentially unlimited number of devices. It does not require pairing or interaction between the sender and the receivers.

We also presented this topic at 38c3. This blog post will contain similar contents albeit with some more details.

Change Your BLE Passkey Like You Change Your Underwear

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Using a static passkey for Bluetooth Low Energy pairing is insecure. Recent versions of the Bluetooth specification contain an explicit warning about this. However, in practice, we often see static passkeys being used. Moreover, there are no public implementations of proofs-of-concept that can practically show why using a static passkey is an issue. This is why we implemented one.

In a recent assessment, we were testing a device that offered a Bluetooth interface for data export and configuration. This device uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and a static passkey (or PIN) is required to pair with it. This passkey is displayed for a few seconds when the device is booted and stays the same on each reboot. In fact, it is derived from static, device-specific data.

Hack.lu 2018: ARM IoT Firmware Emulation Workshop by Saumil Udayan Shah

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

First day at hack.lu. Three of us kicked the conference off with the ARM IoT Firmware Emulation workshop by Saumil. The goal of this workshop was not so much to write exploits or to pwn boxes but to learn how to build a beneficial research environment by emulating the hardware of a Linux based IoT device to run its firmware in order to run analysis and tests.

First step is to obtain the firmware. This could be done by dumping it directly from the device or by downloading firmware images from the vendor. In order to dump the firmware from the device one has to obtain access to the underlying system which is usually done by finding the serial console on the hardware since this one often exposes an unauthenticated root shell. I think there is enough documentation online on how to identify and connect to a serial console so I won’t cover the details here. It’s also covered in Saumil’s slides in detail. Having the bootup logs from this console will be helpful later though. While talking about baud rates for the serial console Saumil made a great pun I don’t want to withhold: “Most common is baud rate 115200. If you find a console with baud rate 9600 you are in fact talking to an acoustic coupler. That’s not an IoT device, it rather belongs to a museum.”

Security of Busch-Jaeger IP Gateway

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

IoT is everywhere right now and there are a lot of products out there. I have been looking at an IP Gateway lately and found some serious issues. The Busch-Welcome IP-Gateway from Busch-Jaeger is one of the devices that bridges the gap between sensors and actors in your smart home and the network/Internet. It enables the communication to a door control system that implements various smart home functions. The device itself is offering an HTTP service to configure it, which is protected by a username and password. Some folks even actually expose the device and its login to the Internet. I tried to configure one of these lately and stumbled upon some security issues that I would like to discuss in this blog post.

Industrial IoT Overview & Case Studies

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Stefan and I had the pleasure of joining a one-day closed workshop on Industrial IoT Security. As always, we ended up with plenty of new research ideas and great contacts. We hope of course to post on follow-up research, but in this short post we quickly want to publish our slides which contain our input for the workshop. We mainly presented on IT security challenges for modern IIoT environments and presented some case studies for successful hardening/protection of IIoT environments as well as security in IIoT product development.

#TR18 Next Generation Internet (NGI) Summaries

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 Next Generation Internet Event.

NGI Keynote by Graeme Neilson

Before his infosec career Graeme was a street performer, then security researcher, now he calls himself a defender. The talk was built around the following sentence: “The infosec industry and community have completely failed to create meaningful change in the behavior of people”.

The following example is a resume of how hacking worked from 1988 to 2017:

Hacking 101 to mobile data

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a short blog post that explains how you can make your own Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) setup for sniffing the traffic between a SIM card and the backend server. This is** NOT a new research** but I hope this will help anyone who doesn’t have a telco background to get started to play with mobile data sniffing and fake base stations. This is applicable to many scenarios today as we have so many IoT devices with SIM cards in it that connects to the backend.
In this particular case, I am explaining the simplest scenario where the SIM card is working with 2G and GPRS. You can probably expect me with more articles with 3G, 4G MitM in future. But lets stick to 2G and GPRS for now.

RIPE IoT Roundtable Meeting / Balanced Security for IPv6 CPE Revisited

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure to participate at the first RIPE IoT Roundtable Meeting in Leeds (thanks! to Marco Hogewoning for organising it). It was a day with many fruitful discussions. I particularly enjoyed Robert Kisteleki‘s talk on RIPE NCC’s own design & (security) process considerations in the context of RIPE Atlas (at TR17 NGI there was an intro to Atlas, too).
In this post I’d like to quickly lay out the main points of my own contribution on “Balanced Security for IPv6 CPE Revisited” (the slides can be found here).

Summary of “Lockpicking in the IoT” at 33C3

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

“Lockpicking in the IoT, …or why adding BTLE to a device sometimes isn’t smart at all” by Ray was one of my favourite talks, as it beautifully showed many different attack vectors as well as giving a nice guide for getting started in this area.

It impressed me how carefree vendors and startups handled hardware and software security in “smart” devices as it seems that their devices were more or less easy to own. In his talk Ray pointed out physical AND implementational weaknesses that remained even after he reported them to the vendors.
The most prominent sample he gave was when he opened a “Masterlock” by spinning a magnet on the lock itself to open it.

Analyzing yet another Smart Home device

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As you have probably already recognized, some of us here at ERNW are doing research in the area of smart home technologies e.g. KNX. Recently, we took a deeper look into a device which is used to control a smart home system produced by the vendor BAB TECHNOLOGIE GmbH called “eibPort”. This device can be used to control smart home systems based on different technologies e.g. EnoCean or KNX depending on the version of the device. The eibPort comes with a visualization running on a webserver to control the whole system e.g. open or close windows, changing the temperature in different rooms or turning the alarm system on or off by simply clicking on symbols. The following screenshots illustrate an example of such a visualization:

Research Diary: IP-Cameras Part 2

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everybody,
This is the second entry in our research diary on IP cameras. If you haven’t done so yet, you should read the first entry in advance. This time we focused more on analysis and exploitation.

Another entry vector

After running a vulnerability scan on both devices, it was revealed that the M1033 has multiple buffer overflow vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-5958 to CVE-2012-5965), which are readily exploitable via Metasploit. This gave us another shell (in addition to the root shell mentioned in the last post), though this time it was not a root shell. By using the find command, we searched for executables having the setuid or setgid bit set. We hoped to use one of those to escalate privileges. To do so yourself add the parameter -perm -4000 to find and it will search for files having the setuid bit set. If you try that on your own unix-like device, for example it should yield /bin/passwd which is perfectly reasonable as you’re able to change your password without being root.

Research Diary: IP-Cameras

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As you probably know we perform research on a regular basis at ERNW. This post is the first entry on our – Benjamin’s and Pascal’s – research diary. You might already have seen Oliver’s post on setting up an research environment or Brian’s posts on IoT botnets (here and here). With that in mind we want to take a look at one of the market leaders for network camera equipment: AXIS.

At first we’d like to give a quick overview of our research objects. We bought two cameras, an AXIS M1033-W and an AXIS M3005-V. The M1033’s description states that it is for “small business, hotels, residences and more”. The M3005 has a typical dome design and was actually seen in some customer environments during projects this year.

IoT the S is for Secure – Unknown Administration Interface in Wireless Plug

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Readers,

just recently i bought a wireless plug on Amazon with the main use of controlling my coffee machine with an app. The installation of the wireless plug was quite easy and only requires me to set my Wifi SSID and my passphrase – that’s it. But what happened behind the scenes? I visited the control interface of my router and saw that along with the other devices there was a new one with the network name HF-LPB100 and a local IP address in my case 192.168.0.235. First of all i wondered about the name itself, but ignored that and kept on looking for open ports.

(Securely) Updating Smart Devices / Some Considerations

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

How to provide updates to IoT devices – yes, I’m aware this might be a overly broad generalization for many different devices – has been the topic of many discussions in the last years (for those interested the papers from the “Internet of Things Software Update Workshop (IoTSU)” might be a good starting point).
Given Matthias and I will moderate the respective session at tomorrow’s IoT Insight Summit I started writing down some points that we consider relevant in this context.

15. Cyber-Sicherheits-Tag

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today Kevin and I had the pleasure to to present at the German 15. Cyber-Sicherheits-Tag in Berlin which is organized by the Alliance for Cyber Security. This iteration covered security aspects of the Internet of Things and we enjoyed some great conversations. The presentations were limited to ten slides and can be found here:

Kevin Schaller – Defense in Depth in IoT

Matthias Luft – Update Management in IoT

Since the slides were supposed to be short and only support the presentation, you still have the chance to get the full content (and even challenge it or ask to dive deeper during the break-out discussions) next week at our own IoT event 😉

IoT Insight Summit November 15, 2016

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The newest addition to ERNW, ERNW Insight which now hosts TROOPERS, is launching a new concept this year. Based on the successful TROOPERS Roundtable sessions, ERNW Insight will host a series events every year covering current and relevant topics in the field of IT Security. While the style of the events may vary the in-depth knowledge sharing that you have come to know from TROOPERS will not!

The inaugural event will be our IoT Insight Summit, taking place on November 15, 2016 at the Crowne Plaza Heidelberg. This 1-day event will begin with a keynote and case study from industry experts. Afterwards, all participants will be divided into five groups of 10 persons each to participate in our “Break Out Sessions”. Every participant will get the opportunity to attend all 5 Break Out Sessions, where our IT Security moderators will lead discussions on typical problems and solutions in IoT.

Setting up a Research Environment for IP Cameras

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Embedded devices often serve as an entry point for an attack on a private or corporate network. The infamous attack on HackingTeam, for example, followed exactly this path as was revealed here. Although the attack may have been for the greater good (refer also to this great keynote), such incidents demonstrate that it is important to properly secure your embedded devices. In a recent blog post, Niklaus presented how he analyzed the security posture of a MAX! Cube LAN Gateway. Moreover, Brian reported a few weeks ago on the security posture of IoT devices (and in particular on one of his cameras). With this post I would like to share my experiences with analyzing another embedded device: the IC-3116W IP camera by Edimax.

How to Become Part of an IoT Botnet

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I suppose there are many people out there who want to achieve a greater good, fight evil corp and “show those guys”. So why not set a statement and become part of a botnet? #Irony!!! Of course I suppose (hope) that none of you actually want to be part of something like an IoT botnet, but joining could in theory be dead easy. So quite a while back I bought a dead cheap WiFi camera for use at home. It was kind of just as insecure as I had expected, so it got it’s own VLAN and stuff and here is why….

Hardware Hacking Week @ ERNW

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Internal workshops are one of the reoccurring events at ERNW, that help us to gain knowledge in areas outside our usual expertise. One of the recent workshops which happened during the week from August 22nd-25th was Hardware Hacking. Held by Brian Butterly (@BadgeWizard) and Dominic Spill (@dominicgs), this workshop took place in two parts. Brian kickstarted the introductory session by guiding us through the fundamental steps of Hardware Hacking. Brian did an excellent job of making things simpler by giving a detailed explanation on the basic concepts. For a beginner in hardware hacking, the topic could be rather intimidating if not handled properly.

KNXmap: A KNXnet/IP Scanning and Auditing Tool

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Users of the KNX, a standard for home automation bus systems, may already have come across KNXnet/IP (also known as EIBnet/IP): It is an extension for KNX that defines Ethernet as a communication medium for KNX which allows communication with KNX buses over IP driven networks. Additionally, it enables one to couple multiple bus installations over IP gateways, or so called KNXnet/IP gateways.

In the course of some KNX related research we’ve had access to various KNXnet/IP gateways from different vendors, most of them coupled in a lab setup for testing purposes. The typical tools used for such tasks are ETS, the professional software developed by the creators of KNX (proprietary, test licenses available) and eibd, an open source implementation of the KNX standard developed by the TU Vienna.

Notes on Hijacking GSM/GPRS Connections

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As shown in previous blogposts we regularly work with GSM/GPRS basestations for testing devices with cellular uplinks or to simply run a private network during TROOPERS. Here the core difference between a random TROOPERS attendee and a device we want to hack is the will to join our network, or not! While at the conference we hand out own SIM cards which accept the TROOERPS GSM network as their “home network” some device need to be pushed a little bit.
Every SIM card has it’s own home network, which is encoded in the fist five (European standard) or six (North American standard) digits of its IMSI – International Subscriber Number. The first three digits are the MCC, the Mobile Country Code, the next two/three the MNC, Mobile Network Code. International network overview are publicly available and for example can be found >here<. For instance, Germany has the MCC 262 and Vodafone Germany uses MNC 02. So a SIM card with an IMSI starting with 26202 belongs to them.
Sticking to the settings in its own SIM card a device will always prefer to connect to it’s own home network above all others. If the home network is not available it will usually go for the strongest signal. To protect users from unnecessary costs, an operator will usually add certain rules to prevent the device from connecting to other networks in the same country. So if you’re an O2 customer in Germany, visit a shopping center and only have reception for a T-Mobile cell, your phone will not directly jump into this network, even though it’s the strongest signal source.

Some Notes on Utilizing Telco Networks for Penetration Tests

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After a couple of years in pentesting Telco Networks, I’d like to give you some insight into our pentesting methodology and setup we are using for testing “Mobile and Telecommunication Devices”. I am not talking about pentesting professional providers’ equipment (as in previous blogposts), it is about pentesting of devices that have a modem in place like a lot of IoT devices (you know about the fridge having a GSM Modem, right?) do.

Discover the Unknown: Analyzing an IoT Device

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post will give a brief overview about how a simple IoT device can be assessed. It will show a basic methodology, what tools can be used for different tasks and how to solve problems that may arise during analyses. It is aimed at readers that are interested in how such a device can be assessed, those with general interest in reverse engineering or the ones who just want to see how to technically approach an unknown device.

The road to secure Smart Cars: ENISA approach

Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

At TROOPERS16, Dr. Cédric LÉVY-BENCHETON an expert in cyber security at ENISA, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security. Dr. Cédric LÉVY-BENCHETON holds a presentation about cyber security of IoT (Internet of Things) and smart cars he presents the current threats in IoT and Smart cars. ENISA is an agency of the European Union. ENISA assists the Commission, the Member States and, the business community in meeting the requirements of network and information security.

How easy to grow robust botnet with low hanging fruits (IoT) – for free

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Attila Marosi works as a Senior Threat Research at Sophos Labs in Hungary. His talk focused on vulnerable IoT devices that are exposed to the internet. His approach was to look for vulnerable devices with low cost tools and publicly available data.

He started his talk with the spoiler that he is not going to reveal any new attacks nor new techniques. But newer data are more adequate and we can see the current state of vulnerable devices connected to the internet. This means his approach was to test the state of IoT devices like Routers, NAS and so on with publicly available data.

13th escar Europe conference | Embedded Security in Cars

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the “escar” (Embedded Security in Cars) conference in Cologne, Germany.
Arriving late Tuesday, I had the chance to get a rich breakfast before joining the con in the hotel Dorint at Cologne’s famous place the Heumarkt. Unfortunately I had to deal with two stumbling blocks on my way to the Dobrint: The magnetic sensor of my mobile which went crazy (no compass) and – the date. 11th of November in Cologne means just one thing – carneval! The whole city was just in a state of exception. Everybody on my way to the venue seemed to be drinking or beeing already drunk – at 9am! 😉
Being a little late, I went straight to the room after registration. As there was only one track to follow you could not miss any talk – nice thing!
After we were welcomed by the hosts, and the first talk started.

Car Hacking Lab – Work in Progress

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We just wanted to share some impressions from our car hacking lab:

https://www.insinuator.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/car_lab2.mp4

stay tuned,

The ERNW Car Hacking Team

Scal(e)ing down Privacy

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As you might know we are continuously doing research on medical devices. I presented some of the new results at Power of Community 2014 last week and we thought we would share some of the details with you here. The focus of the previous work was testing medical devices that are used in hospitals like patient monitors, syringe pumps or even MRIs. This time we looked at a device that every user can use at home and which is available to anyone on the market: A smart scale.