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Turning GPS Tracking Devices Against Their Owners
ancientribe writes "Those low-cost embedded tracking devices in your smartphone or those personal GPS devices that track the whereabouts of your children, your car, your pet, or a shipment can easily be intercepted by hackers, who can then pinpoint their whereabouts, impersonate them, and spoof their physical location. A researcher demonstrated at SOURCE Boston how he was able to hack Zoombak's popular personal tracking devices."
As a consumer, I assumed security.
As a technological thinker, I feared this.
Technology can be hacked and used against you? Dang.
Be seeing you...
If everyone has access to the information (signals flying through the air) it will eventually be used against you! This is yet another reason why people should never carry their phone all the time, unless you don't mind being tracked.
Privacy these days is a dying luxury!
The Android market has an app that claims to change a device's GPS location. Is their an equivalent for cell tower tracking?
How about deleting location cache file.
Dad, are you space?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Hijacking? Kidnapping??? Who IS this guy, Donald Rumsfeld using a nom-de-plume? Or perhaps a nom-deguerre as the case may be.
How about just saying someone could use it for mischief, instead of giving us the Ultimate Doomsday of Deadly Doom?
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Leave my cell at home when I'm out cheating on my wife.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The article was quite Slashdotted, bad link, or something... found it and reposted below.
(Also, I found the bold sections funny.)
Weaponizing GPS Tracking Devices
Posted by Kelly Jackson Higgins on Friday Apr 22nd at 5:05am
Those low-cost embedded tracking devices in your smartphone or those personal GPS devices that track the whereabouts of your children, car, pet, or shipment can easily be intercepted by hackers, who can then pinpoint their whereabouts, impersonate them, and spoof their physical location, a researcher has discovered.
Security researcher Don Bailey at SOURCE Boston today disclosed the newest phase of his research on the lack of security in embedded devices, demonstrating how he is able to hack vendor Zoombak's personal GPS locator devices in order to find, target, and impersonate the user or equipment rigged with these consumer-focused devices. Bailey, a security consultant with iSEC Partners, decided to call out the widely available products from Zoombak after the vendor and its parent company Securus Inc. didn't respond when he alerted them about the security weaknesses. Mitigating these attacks would only require a few simple changes to the product, he says. Meanwhile, the threat is real, he says. "Anyone with a little hardware knowledge could reverse-engineer this," he says. "Children are physically at [risk] because these devices can be turned into weapons."
Bailey also released tools today for each of the three attacks he demonstrated at SOURCE Boston.
"Embedded devices are low-cost, easy to use, and easy to debug. And the security landscape is very small," Bailey says. "There is very little capability for integrating secure communications on the devices and ensuring that it's your code executing on there."
The underlying issue is that the low-cost and rapid commoditization of these embedded systems precludes their being properly secured. "There's a low entry point for people to develop them, so you have a serious problem because new developers and new startups don't have an understanding of security. It's an insecure product by default," he says.
Embedded system security is tricky in that there are so many moving parts in the final products, including baseband, GPS firmware, application firmware, and SIM software, according to Bailey.
It's not just consumer GPS tracking devices that are vulnerable, either. Bailey says he was also able to hack server SCADA embedded systems. "I was able to remotely compromise the box in its entirety" via the microcontroller on it, he says.
With the Zoombak device, Bailey was able to discover the tracking devices, profile them, using what he calls "war texting," to intercept their location. Zoombak uses a Web 2.0 interface that provides a map showing the GPS-equipped person or payload's physical location. The devices receive commands via SMS text messages.
In the first attack, Bailey forced the device to send him its physical location using techniques to grab the GPS coordinates and local cell tower information. "I can force those devices to bypass the manufacturer's controls and give me their information and they have no idea that I've intercepted their location," he says.
Once he fingerprinted the device, he can determine just what it is. "I know if it's a semi, a mail van, or a teenager driving the family car just by watching the vehicle for a certain period of time. I can use traffic cameras on Google satellite," he says. That would leave the GPS-outfitted person or payload prone to physical attack, he says.
Bailey was also able to impersonate the Zoombak personal GPS tracking device. "I use it as a weapon to fake the location data. If it's a truck on I-70, I can take the device and force it to send false location to the server and meantime, could hijack the truck," he explains. Zoombak's command and control channel is in the clear, unencrypted.
These devices could be locked down with some type of PKI on the microcompu
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Years ago I made a double layer heavy duty aluminum hat (similar to the one I wear) for my cell phone. It can no longer read my thoughts and the rays from the cell towers no longer bother it. I don't think the towers can read it's thoughts or see it's location either. The phone never has functioned well, but it is attractive.
I suspect Zoombak will close the hole fairly quickly. Fear not.
I would love to read more on his methods.
The question is which Zoombak devices did he compromise? Was it their Zoombak 520, 521 or the Securus eClick (Zoombak was acquired by them) series?
Or kids could use them to fool their parents or criminals to forge an alibi. Instead of impersonating someone else.
Bleed like a craze, dad.
Caveat Utilitor
I run a server to host these tracking devices. The communication protocol used is very ridiculous on most cheap/affordable devices (haven't tried the top of the line devices, as there is little market for them). Handshake is just a simple 'Hello this is device #XXXXXX' and the whole session is just based on that simple handshake. There is NO authentication, NO encryption of any kind. Any person with basic knowledge of the device can wreak havoc on the server just by using simple perl script. Mind you that the broken security of the server is caused by the limitation of the device. While we, operators, can freely design our own server, the communication protocol is limited to the closed-source tracking device. The tracking device itself (at least our main product) even have a very simple authentication scheme (to configure via sms). I bet that your bank pin is 4 times more secure than it.
The limitation on data encryption is mainly because of the microcontroller used. In many products, it's just as powerful as your typical arduino boards. There's just simply not enough power to do the extra encrypting job. There's also the issue of battery life in case of emergency situation.
While I agree that this whole thing is stupid, even I as an operator, I can not do anything except nag at the supplier to somehow improve/fix it for the future models.
Not quite. But interesting nevertheless.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
You'd think he'd know the difference between "hackers" and "crackers", right? Oh no, not him. He keeps peddling the use of "hacker" as an offensive pejorative term.
I just turn off the 'Location' as it is called in the n900 settings menu. I don't need it.
If I travel somewhere and want to use the gps, i turn it on again. It is not that difficult.
When I am in another city or abroad, I want people to be able to track me, in case something happens to me.
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
I often need to be in 2 places at once. With this "service", now I can!
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Quote from the article:
"Anyone with a little hardware knowledge could reverse-engineer this," he says. "Children are physically at [risk] because these devices can be turned into weapons."
Stopped reading the article when reaching that point. Sorry, you lost your credibility there...
As a consumer, I assumed security.
As a technological thinker, I feared this.
Joke's on them. The GPS in my Nokia phone is so piss poor as to be unusable. 5-10 mins to lock on a signal and requires clear view of the sky (In pocket won't do). If they try to track me using that my response is simple laughter. :P
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Did he actually demonstrate SPOOFING a message from an arbitrary Zoombak device (i.e. one he did not have physical control of) OR did he send a message from one who's SIM he removed?
Unless he demonstrated that he can SPOOF any Zoombak device at any time, all he did was capture a request to the device, figure out what the response looks like, and send back a bogus response to their server. And, he destroyed the device in the process to get the SIM out. So much for his warranty.
So, where is the insecurity, exactly?
Now, if he actually demonstrated the ability to locate arbitrary Zoombak devices using this technique or spoof arbitrary Zoombak devices, it's clear this "expert" is creating FUD for his 15 minutes of fame. I would love to read his paper or see his presentation if the former were the case because then it becomes relevant.