IoT Smart Lock Vulnerability Spotlights Bigger Issues

https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/featured/tripwire-research-iot-smart-lock-vulnerability/

by axsharma • 6 years ago

52 32 6 years ago

axsharma• 6 years ago

Got an IoT smart lock? Watch out for hackers unlocking it from anywhere!

A security vulnerability discovered and responsibly reported by Craig Young of Tripwire exposes flaws in U-Tec UltraLoq locks, among other devices.

cortesoft• 6 years ago

No lock keeps out a determined attacker. I bet fewer people could carry out this attack than people who can pick a normal lock.

senectus1• 6 years ago

Locks are really only there to ward off honest people.

DangitBobby2• 6 years ago

This sentiment is expressed in the second sentence of the linked article.

kevin_nisbet• 6 years ago

That may be true today while the vast majority of locks are normal locks. But it seems reasonable that would change if the vast majority of locks were IOT locks.

What's difficult to know, is if there were large market of IOT locks, and much more scrutiny on the companies manufacturing IOT security products, whether that would lead to a reduction in unsophisticated attacks against the products.

As of today, it seems many digital locks are just as bad or worse at physical security than traditional locks, and the IOT connectivity opens up new avenues of attack.

mjg59• 6 years ago

Finding IoT vulnerabilities generally requires some degree of skill. Turning that into a pre-packaged tool that anyone with a computer can use is not much harder.

macintux• 6 years ago

And once packaged, those vulnerabilities are going to be faster to exploit than a physical lock could be picked by anyone not an expert.

Or, heck, just unlock all the doors and see what chaos happens. Try that with physical locks.

nullc5• 6 years ago

There is a big difference between attacks usually that leave signs of tampering and attacks that leave no evidence.

Picking normal locks leave easily discovered evidence. I once even detected a lock at my office had been picked when I put my key in the next morning and noticed it felt different!

(I learned it had, in fact, been picked-- because after that happened I asked on the company chat and one of our security people responded that he'd picked it the night before for reasons)

RHSeeger• 6 years ago

I'm curious about the specifics. From my experience, picking a normal lock works very much the same as using a key; you're just relying on the fact that the inside of the lock is the same "shape" as the key to put the tumblers in the correct location.

nullc5• 6 years ago

It's really a shame that "IoT" locks are destroying the reputation of electronic locks.

A well constructed electronic lock can be considerably more secure against non-destructive attack than any mechanical lock. Yet IoT locks continually have gross vulnerabilities that allow undetectable bypass-- and issue that even moderately good mechanicals locks don't really have (even picking usually leaves evidence).

flyinghamster• 6 years ago

Often, as LockPickingLawyer on YouTube has demonstrated, one can simply place a magnet in just the right location to pop a relay and bypass all the high-tech gimmickry.

bsder3• 6 years ago

It's really a shame that "IoT" locks are destroying the reputation of electronic locks.

Original funding from IndieGogo. LOL. Yeah, that's a bunch of folks who know lots about security. And as soon as I see MQTT (or any other abstraction layer above UDP or TCP/IP) I know that doom follows.

The worst part about this is that making secure locks when cloud connectivity is available just isn't that hard. Use a Curve25519 library. Everybody (lock, phone, cloud) generates their own keys and exchanges public keys facilitated by an originator set of keys from the cloud installed at manufacture time (this prevents getting man-in-the-middled at configure time without having to go through complicated public-key exchange algorithms that might get cracked).

Commands are always encrypted using public keys and always involve the cloud. Return no ACK (your ACK is that the lock unlocked) so you can't brute force. Done.

If you really want to be paranoid, the lock and phone should exchange a separate set of public keys that encrypt the commands uploaded to the cloud that get forwarded to the lock. Now, even compromising the cloud doesn't let you unlock the door.

A secure lock without Internet connectivity is quite a bit harder because you have no unimpeachable "oracle" to present a point of "truth" that can be relied on.

CorrectHorseBat2• 6 years ago

It's not that easy: Now the lock doesn't work when either your phone or your lock has no internet connection, or the cloud is down. Also, when the manufacturer gets hacked they can remotely open any lock. (And you need to use a phone that is manufactured by the same company as the lock?).

I'd say there are better ways to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks during set-up, which are IMO not really a problem anyway. You have bigger problems if that is a part of your threat model.

If you really want to be paranoid, the lock and phone should exchange a separate set of public keys that encrypt the commands uploaded to the cloud that get forwarded to the lock. Now, even compromising the cloud doesn't let you unlock the door.

But now you're doing public key exchange which you wanted to avoid, why then involve the cloud at all?

jonquark• 6 years ago

as soon as I see MQTT (or any other abstraction layer above UDP or TCP/IP) I know that doom follows.

As someone who works on MQTT server technology, this opinion surprised me - it's a lot easier to get the security right using an MQTT server - user credentials are part of the protocol where as you have to build it yourself if you start at the TCP/UDP layer.

The problem in this example wasn't that they were using MQTT it's that there was no authentication/authorisation checking done - normally achieved by configuration - that would be possible in TCP as well - by not implementing it ;)

nullc5• 6 years ago

I think the developers of stuff like this come in two primary flavours: people who know enough to realize that it's not totally trivial, who rapidly fall down a security rabbit hole once they get going... and people who just churn out the minimum that meets the superficial description of the product ASAP.

Because of the aformentioned rabbit hole, the fomer group doesn't tend to ship many products compared to the latter. The latter group's design gets compromised by a magnet or a magic packet because the description didn't say anything about those. :)

I think if you think hard about it for a while and do some research you'll find that it's actually more complicated than you might think. ... two way communications between the 'key' and the lock, non-volatile counters in each to prevent replay, secure crypto that is too slow and power hungry when run on the 8-bit microcontroller that fits in the space/power/cost budget... etc.

Of course, you can work around these challenges-- but that's the rabbit hole. :)

There are various kinds of pretty secure electronic locks. Because of the extremely poor track record of cryptography in embedded devices I'd be inclined to find designs that rely less on crypto more trustworthy. I'm fond of the kaba mas x-10. :)

tehlike• 6 years ago

Homeassistant + yale zigbee/leave lock. No need for cloud at all. If you care, you can vpn to your house.

neom• 6 years ago

While not IoT - Lock Picking Lawyer has a bunch of "smart" locks that he owns with very little effort. [1] My favourites are these RFID locks [2][3] and this fingerprint lock.[4]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/lockpickinglawyer/search?query=sma...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4lVylO7y5U

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXW27KKHtc8

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTys_WYBOLE

axegon_• 6 years ago

I've fiddled with IoT very little, yet with the little experience I have, I must say, I'm not surprised at all. And I think the main reasons are the ecosystems around IoT: they are a mess - no standards, no common communication protocols, none of that. So it is a bit of a "every man for himself" kind of thing. I have a few smart devices at home and it really boggles my mind how much they differ from one another when they connect to the wifi. Some fire up a tiny http server which I would assume is used as a rest api, some use udp connections, each one uses the most random port you can imagine, the developer documentation for all of them is nothing short of crap. I think the security vulnerabilities will start going down once:

1. Everything goes open source.

2. Everyone settles on a standard way of communicating between those devices.

Sure, vulnerabilities won't disappear completely but they will go down. At this stage, I feel like they aren't exploited due to lack of interest rather than good will or lack of opportunities.

red_admiral• 6 years ago

I'm pessimistic about the open-source part. The lesson I took from OpenSSL/Heartbleed is: even if something's very widely used and people could spend some collective effort on it (or just contribute some funding), that doesn't mean anyone will. The Linux Core Foundation funding after that, and google contributing its own expertise through BoringSSL, made OpenSSL a lot more secure but it took a wake-up call.

Nasrudith• 6 years ago

The sad thing is OpenSSL with heartbleed unpatched would still be an improvement. Even though the entire related class of buffer bugs shouldn't be a thing.

jmrobles• 6 years ago

This is the funny part:

"the [cloud] server does have strong security” --> oh, good

"and that users’ data have been encrypted by the MD5 algorithm --> WTF???

antihero• 6 years ago

How are these people even in 2020?

exabrial• 6 years ago

and that users’ data “have been encrypted by the MD5 algorithm”

Literal head-desk. They ought to be sued. There is so much wrong with that one statement.

IoT Smart Lock Vulnerability Spotlights Bigger Issues

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