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

hmmm....

[girlintraining]

Useful for:

* Corporate espionage
* Screwing with professors at school
* Pissing off Steve Jobs.

We all know which one's most likely.

Re:hmmm....

[Dragoniz3r]

I guess we all know what Gizmodo will be doing at the next major conference.

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.

This is why standard protocols help

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is why standard protocols help

[mc6809e]

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.

Yeah, but then the maker would have to licence the technology and that adds cost. The chip used in the device doesn't come with Bluetooth. It's a very simple chip.

I suspect that the problem here is that the engineer just didn't think about security.

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...

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.