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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!"
Useful for:
* Corporate espionage
* Screwing with professors at school
* Pissing off Steve Jobs.
We all know which one's most likely.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
While Bluetooth certainly has its issues and took a while to address all the early security concerns, I really wish wireless device creators would stop rolling their own protocols. With limited engineering, they are almost certainly guaranteed to do it badly. As of Bluetooth 2.1, all communication aside from service discovery is encrypted. There are still pairing exploits and implementation defects, but at least they have the core idea right. In order to monkey with a Bluetooth presentation remote, you would have to (a) discover the shared key during the speakers presentation, (b) convince the presenter to redo pairing prior to speaking and somehow get them to pair with your evil device instead (has a Bluetooth man-in-the-middle attack been tried yet?), or (c) give up and settle for just jamming the communication, causing a whopping 30 seconds of confusion. If you design a wireless protocol now without over-the-air encryption, you are doing it wrong.
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? ^_^
You could implement a better attack by just throwing Arduinos at the presenter.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
In many of these cases the little proprietary receiver dongle accepts arbitrary keystrokes, not just the ones that the remote has buttons for, because it is exactly the same item as the one being sold(under that brand, or one or more others) in a package with a wireless keyboard and often a mouse as well. Some kits come with everything in one box, receiver, keyboard, mouse, little powerpoint clicker widget.
In other cases, I imagine, the engineer in charge of knocking together the receiver unit (correctly) realized that implementing a general-purpose system for taking arbitrary keycodes encapsulated in whatever the proprietary RF protocol is and dumping them to the host system just like any USB HID device wouldn't be much harder than implementing just the 6 keycodes found on revision 1 of Product X and would save him from having to do it again when revision 1.1 adds another couple of buttons, and revision 2.0 has to have a special button for the ribbon interface, or whatever it happens to be.