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!"

Comments

Re:Microcontroller, not Arduino

[marcansoft]

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.

RTFA?

[WD]

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.

Re:This is why standard protocols help

[DeadCatX2]

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...