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Wireless Presenters Attacked Using an Arduino
An anonymous reader writes "This week Dutch security researcher Niels Teusink described a method of attacking wireless presenter devices at an Amsterdam security conference. He had a demo showing how it is possible to use an Arduino and Metasploit to get remote code execution by sending arbitrary keystrokes to the presenter dongle. He has now released the code and made a blog post explaining how it all works. Better watch out the next time you're giving a presentation using one of these devices!"
Strictly speaking, Arduinos aren't microcontrollers. They're a popular hobbyist embedded platform based around the Atmel AVR microcontroller family. Much like Dells are a particular brand of computer based around x86 architecture microprocessors.
But yes, "Arduino this", "Arduino that" gets tiring after a while. Arduinos have a huge following, but there are zillions of alternatives of all shapes and sizes (many of them better in many ways). There's nothing Arduino-specific about this hack.
Did you rta? He demoed getting a Metasploit payload on the system
While strictly true (once you attach a microcontroller chip to a PCB board, it's no longer just a microcontroller), there isn't much to an Arduino board aside from the controller. Most include some basic power management and a USB-to-serial chip for programming and comms, but those are just common features rather than requirements to be considered an Arduino. IMO, what defines an Arduino is its software package... Or is that what you were getting at? ^_^
It's clear that you and the moderators haven't bothered to actually read the article. The research and tools used for the attack were non-trivial, and the impact is remote code execution.
Whereas your average Arduino board is about $20-30 or so, an Arduino board with Bluetooth costs about $150.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=148
Yes, Bluetooth is that expensive. The ArduinoBT board uses an off-the-shelf BlueGiga WT11. Newark sells those for about $60.
http://www.newark.com/bluegiga/wt11-a-ai/class-1-bluetooth-2-0-edr-module/dp/15P4005
Mind you, this is a Class 1 (i.e. long range) transmitter, using BT 2.0 and not BT 2.1. Compare this to a standard RF transmitter and receiver, which is a couple bucks per chip...
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Do you mean the Bluetooth USB modules used to add Bluetooth support to a PC that doesn't have it? Unfortunately, an embedded system doesn't have a desktop-class processor to run the Bluetooth stack.
Oh, and those el-cheap-o Bluetooth modules you're suggesting are probably very out-dated, which is why they're so cheap. That $3 module probably cost more when it was less than a year old and they weren't trying to dump the inventory that they can't sell at a higher price...
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