How to exploit home routers for anonymity

http://danmcinerney.org/how-to-exploit-home-routers-for-anonymity/

by DanMcInerney • 12 years ago

199 78 12 years ago

bluedino• 12 years ago

So basically this Shodan service scans the web, indexing devices such as IP cameras and routers. You can then search their database by device type or model, and then try the default user/passwords on these devices and create a VPN account for your own use?

I wonder how many botnets use this technique instead of randomly scanning, whether it's their own implementation/database or using a service such as this. Also an interesting business model, "I've got the addresses of 10,000 XYZ routers, model 1234, for $50.00"

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

Botnets typically just infect a site and do drive-by exploiting of the client. Then they don't need a proxy and they get to siphon user information. Proxies/VPNs are only useful for things like C&C servers.

user24• 12 years ago

This submission just links to the homepage. here is the permalink: http://danmcinerney.org/how-to-exploit-home-routers-for-anon...

perhaps a mod can update the URL.

dabent• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, the other articles on the home page look pretty interesting as well.

MrClean• 12 years ago

Ah. Great. Anonymity in the identity-theft way.

AnthonyMouse2• 12 years ago

This is, incidentally, the reason why government-resistant anonymity services need to be legal. If you don't care about stealing credit card numbers or hurting people then you don't care about breaking into some poor sucker's router. But if you're blowing the whistle on some organizational malfeasance, you won't, so you need the likes of Tor.

rainsford2• 12 years ago

I think that oversimplifies an important point. Criminals may not CARE about breaking into someone's computer or router, but that doesn't mean they're capable of doing so. Tor significantly lowers the bar for anonymity online, and there is no question in my mind that it enables criminals who wouldn't have the means to mask their identities otherwise.

This is not necessarily an argument against tools like Tor, but it's a tradeoff that I think many Tor supporters are too willing to ignore.

hf• 12 years ago

The opening paragraph asserts that simply not publishing ("censoring") such concrete, recipe-like exploits of the deficiencies of our shared infrastructure "won't make practices like those outlined [in the article] disappear"[2].

I am reminded of Steve Kemp's 2014 post »Secure your rsync shares, please«[0], relating how he abandoned a project employing zmap[1] upon discovering numerous openly accessible rsync shares containing sensible information. His closing remarks echo the sentiment of the article under discussion here: "I considered not posting this, but I suspect 'bad people' already know..,"[0]

What can be done? Are we reduced to just securing our friends' and families' infrastructure, all the while standing by idly while others outside of our direct sphere of influence suffer the consequences of naïvety?

[0] http://blog.steve.org.uk/secure_your_rsync_shares__please_.h...

[1] A cleverly-built, fast network scanner, https://zmap.io/

[2] http://danmcinerney.org/how-to-exploit-home-routers-for-anon...

mcherm3• 12 years ago

What can be done? Are we reduced to just securing our friends' and families' infrastructure, all the while standing by idly while others outside of our direct sphere of influence suffer the consequences of naïvety?

No. We can write articles similar to this one which, instead of clearly explaining step-by-step procedures for exploiting weaknesses, clearly explain step-by-step procedures for REPAIRING weaknesses.

jasonkolb2• 12 years ago

I think you give way too much credit to the average person. It's easy to lose sight of how scary technical things are to normal people when you're in it day in and day out, but to ask the average person to change something in their router is kind of like asking me to replace a cylinder in my car.

There's a reason things like the Geek Squad are around and can charge as much as they do...

jasonkolb2• 12 years ago

I often wonder the same thing. Other things that require the same level of expertise typically tell you that you need to do something by actively breaking. I know I need to call my heating and cooling guy because my air conditioning stops working, but nothing breaks to tell you to change your router settings. Technically, it's already broken.

gamerdonkey• 12 years ago

Hopefully, by making this kind of exploitation common knowledge for the more tech-oriented crowd, we will be able to bring about change in the companies that manufacture the devices. You're right that the vast majority of people do not realize why they need to secure their infrastructure and would not know how to do it if they did. For that kind of person, the default needs to change to something more secure.

This kind of "change through widespread knowledge of exploitation" strategy saw some success in changing the default encryption schemes of WiFi routers. So, we're already kind of in the same area.

mobiplayer• 12 years ago

As usual there's actually one effective way: Education.

You could also try scaring people about the end of the Internet, their money stolen and their pets kidnapped if they don't secure their router, but that would still be education.

dfa02• 12 years ago

Another reminder to use strong, non-default credentials on something that is the edge of your network.

I'm still amazed by how many people drive around leaving their cars unlocked.

kordless3• 12 years ago

I leave my keys in the car sometimes when I'm running errands in my home town. I care a whole lot more about my network security at home than I do my car. It's just a car.

dfa02• 12 years ago

The reason to secure your network is a good reason to secure your car.

Your network and your car can/will be used by bad guys to do bad things.

You should care.

js2• 12 years ago

You are potentially exposing yourself to liability should your car be stolen and involved in an accident:

http://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/E...

(IANAL, it looks like a court is not likely to find you liable, but you're still exposing yourself to the hassle of a law suit.)

kalleboo• 12 years ago

In my country, it's illegal to leave the keys in your car when you're not in it (a child could get in it to play and hurt themselves or others)

abus• 12 years ago

Why release pre-made tools that allow anyone to cause harm? You could still explain the problem without them or show code snippets if you have to.

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

It's the most effective wake-up call.

xenophonf• 12 years ago

Because I don't believe you until you release the proof-of-concept. It's like saying you made some huge scientific discovery without including the data and methods to back it up.

jonaldomo• 12 years ago

This is a good write up Dan. Is there anything as an owner of a home router we can do to protect ourselves?

nissehulth• 12 years ago

Make sure your router doesn't allow admin access from the outside. Make sure you have a decent admin password. Disable any built-in cloud/ftp/sharing services that you don't use or need. If you use them, make sure to use good passwords and remove any built-in/default account. Disable UPnP in the router if you don't really need it (and understand the risks).

checker• 12 years ago

I'm no expert but I imagine it's a combination of keeping your router's firmware up-to-date, using a properly configured firewall, and using a strong password for your router login.

engtech• 12 years ago

You'd think, but most consumer equipment is abandonware and the firmware isn't updated once a newer model is out.

thejosh• 12 years ago

don't let your router be able to be accessed from outside, ie disable 80/8080/22.

kordless3• 12 years ago

It feels like we need to include anonymity in the Internet Bill of Rights:

1. I have a right to read or write public information in an anonymous way.

2. I have a right to prevent you from reading or writing MY private information in an anonymous way, even if the intent is to obtain the right to exercise #1 in the process.

3. Using someone else's infrastructure/compute/power to enable #1 without breaking #2 requires you pay for it. I would also propose my private information is available at a price.

Expecting the right to anonymity by removing the rights of others in the process places an individual in cognitive dissonance. It's not a good place to be.

With the advent of cryptocurrencies, we're finally in a place someone can pay me to use a portion of my infrastructure for enabling their anonymity. I'm willing to contribute to the cause as long as it's worth my while.

devconsole5• 12 years ago

Your infrastructure will immediately be used to download or upload child pornography. If you're exceptionally unlucky, the FBI will come knocking and, if you're unable to provide them with a useful honeypot, you may risk legal consequences. If you're unable to prove your innocence (the request for the CP did come from your IP address, after all) then you may be very screwed.

I invite the community to toss around ideas about how to protect against this. I hypothesize that it's an unsolvable problem: if you enable strong anonymity, that anonymity will immediately be used for child porn.

One way to combat this would be to have some kind of credentialing, where you are able to generate credentials for the anonymous party to use. Assuming your infrastructure is set up as a Tor hidden service, then it's possible for them to use your infrastructure anonymously, and then you can revoke the credentials for individual violators.

However, under that scheme, your IP address(es) are shared by every user. 4chan will immediately ban all of them as soon as it becomes clear you're a proxy, for example.

It may still be worth exploring, but it needs some thought. Tor itself still doesn't have "endpoint bridges," that is, endpoints which aren't publicly listed. Meaning it's very easy to ban all of Tor, as far as I know.

drdaeman3• 12 years ago

unable to prove your innocence

Here's the issue. Return presumption of innocence back and problem's solved.

Obviously, that's impossible in a real world.

credentials for the anonymous party to use

That wouldn't be anonymous anymore. And there's no way to realistically force a single human to have only one credential - if one's banned they'll just generate a new one.

rsync2• 12 years ago

"I invite the community to toss around ideas about how to protect against this. I hypothesize that it's an unsolvable problem"

I'm not sure if you would count this as a solution, but, conceivably you could "enable anonymity" at very low bandwidth ... say ... the equivalent of 9600 baud ?

This is fast enough for speech. It is not fast enough for any kind of multimedia that would be acceptable in 2014 and beyond. It might be a barrier that would cause all bad guys to use other networks, but still allow the kind of "freedom" that we're all convinced twitter gives us (and so on).

DerpDerpDerp• 12 years ago

I think our ability to communicate privately as a society at large is more important than the issues of child pornography or terrorism, both of which have policing avenues besides pervasive monitoring and tracking of all associations and messages through communication networks.

But yes, we should think of the children, 9/11, etc.

drdaeman3• 12 years ago

Could you provide a definition for "in an anonymous way" in #1 and "prevent from reading" in #2?

My concerns are:

As for anonymity: Internet protocols require addressing - without an address where to send packets back you can only communicate unidirectionally - sending information but not receiving any. Does being identified by an address still considered "anonymous"?

As for prevention: I'm not sure why need any sort of law to do so. Is there any case - except for law enforcement situations - where one's prevented from disclosing their private information?

Also, writing "requires you pay for it" may have bad consequences. For example, in Russia we had a copyright law that said quite similar thing - a statement that any software license must explicitly define payment process (or explicitly declare rights being provided free of charge) - and this led to issue with perceived legality of some FLOSS licenses that don't say anything about. To my knowledge, this hadn't been ever examined in a court and had been fixed in laws since then, but hope you see the point.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

The Bill of Rights already explicitly says it isn't the List of Rights.

kordless3• 12 years ago

The intent of it is a framework, right? i.e. it's not inclusive of all rights, just ones that are currently applicable and a template of intent for future ones.

bradleyland• 12 years ago

Probably worth pointing out that one should remain aware of their local laws when carrying out such activities as the ones outlined in this HOW TO. Because you're blindly hitting hosts and attempting logins, you don't know whose infrastructure you're probing. If you accidentally knock on the wrong door, the simple act of attempting a log in can cause issues for you (legal and otherwise).

I'm trying to avoid sounding like Chicken Little here, but this article makes these actions very accessible. If you're someone who is just getting started toying with networks and security, it's likely that you haven't thought through what can happen if something you try actually works.

Nmap has a great page that discusses the ins-and-outs of the civil and legal issues involved with port scanning (a related activity). However, keep in mind that the guide linked here goes well beyond port scanning in to actually attempting, and presumably, gaining access to someone else's network. While the legality of port scanning is ambiguous, accessing someone else's network is not. If you land on the wrong guy's lawn, you can end up in a very expensive, and potentially dangerous place.

http://nmap.org/book/legal-issues.html

0xdeadbeefbabe2• 12 years ago

Of course you can ignore all that if you are attacking from Nigeria.

Laws are exciting and important (especially good ones like Newton's laws of motion), but laws could improve too: If someone gets caught doing this they probably ought to do community service working on some bug bounty program instead of going to jail.

Nanzikambe• 12 years ago

I love this impression that if you're connecting from <insert somewhere in Africa>, laws don't apply. I'd wager nobody that's ever actually lived anywhere in 3rd world bandies it about.

True, you're less likely to actually be convicted, but the months/years waiting for trail is guaranteed to be worse than your actual sentence elsewhere, if not fatal.

Arnt• 12 years ago

When I read the announcement, I got the feeling that what he's doing isn't so much leveraging other people's routers as providing the owners of those routers with plausible deniability.

Legal and IMO worthy of much praise.

pavel_lishin• 12 years ago

it's likely that you haven't thought through what can happen if something you try actually works.

Yup. Luckily, when I tried something similar, I was very much a minor, so the only consequence was that our ISP banned our previous account and required us to sign up for a new one.

dtwwtd• 12 years ago

A couple years back there was a similar presentation at Defcon that used routers that exposed UPNP to the public internet. I've linked the talk below:

http://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-19-archive.html#...

timtadh2• 12 years ago

Stuff like this is why I built my own router (I recommend the ALIX series http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm). High quality hardware and you don't have to worry about the software because you control all of it. Right down to the BIOS if you want to.

devconsole5• 12 years ago

How would you verify on demand that the BIOS isn't compromised?

timtadh2• 12 years ago

I don't know about "on demand" but PCEngines will give the source for the BIOS and has an older version posted to the site. http://pcengines.ch/tinybios.htm

lurkinggrue• 12 years ago

Could be the processors as well, better to forge the chips by hand to be sure.

notastartup• 12 years ago

seems like google is saying it's a malware site where's the cached version

noonespecial• 12 years ago

The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to wonder whether or not your VPN provider is saving logs or not, you are in control of that.

If you take over a single router, a provider does indeed have logs of both the inbound you used to reach the router, and the outbound traffic you create from it. Simple timing logging will show its you and if its "their" router, they'll (at least theoretically) be able to decrypt your traffic too. (And that's assuming it wasn't a great big tasty honey-pot to begin with, pooh-bear)

If you must do this, bounce between a few... and if you must do this, just use tor already.

wmf2• 12 years ago

In this case the VPN "provider" is the router itself and since you owned it you can eliminate logs. The ISP may have flow-level logs but those are so voluminous that they probably aren't kept long.

ZoF• 12 years ago

The parent comment was(pretty clearly) referring to what you're calling "flow-level logs"... Quite obviously you can delete the router's logs(it's mentioned in the article and by the parent comment); the ISP's traffic logs on the other hand?

those are so voluminous that they probably aren't kept long.

Bold assertion.

bananas• 12 years ago

If you fancy going out, this works pretty well. I tried it on my router:

http://www.nickkusters.com/Services/Thomson-SpeedTouch

Yes - default WiFi passwords for a big chunk of the routers in Europe are pretty easy to calculate.

How to exploit home routers for anonymity

Related Stories