Slashdot Mirror
Open Millions of Hotel Rooms With Arduino
MrSeb writes with an excerpt from Extreme Tech about a presentation at Black Hat: "Bad news: With an Arduino microcontroller and a little bit of programming, it's possible for a hacker to gain instant, untraceable access to millions of key card-protected hotel rooms. This hack was demonstrated by Cody Brocious, a Mozilla software developer, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. At risk are four million hotel rooms secured by Onity programmable key card locks. According to Brocious, who didn't disclose the hack to Onity before going public, there is no easy fix: There isn't a firmware upgrade — if hotels want to secure their guests, every single lock will have to be changed. I wish I could say that Brocious spent months on this hack, painstakingly reverse-engineering the Onity lock protocol, but the truth — as always, it seems — is far more depressing. 'With how stupidly simple this is, it wouldn't surprise me if a thousand other people have found this same vulnerability and sold it to other governments,' says Brocious. 'An intern at the NSA could find this in five minutes.'"
Bad news: With an Arduino microcontroller and a little bit of programming, it's possible for a hacker to gain instant, untraceable access to millions of key card-protected hotel rooms.
Well, that's it! There's only one thing we can do... outlaw Arduinos
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When the guys share these hacks with the companies ahead of time, they tend to get sued or get their presentations cancelled by the vengeful corporations. They're better off not disclosing these things ahead of time.
When demonstrated for the reporter, the hack only worked on *one* out of *four* of the doors tested in a REAL hotel, and then only on the second attempt after Brocious fine tuned and tweaked his software. Also, this can be defeated by simply using any one of the mechanical locks on the door.
The bottom line is that if you aren't using the mechanical bolt or slide lock when staying at *any* hotel, you were vulnerable way before this hack. Keep in mind that there are plenty of AUTHORIZED users of master card keys on the hotel staff.
It's easily and effectively argued that security through obscurity does no one any good, but responsible disclosure is still widely considered to be a good practice. Supposing a vendor is willing to fix their serious bugs, it really helps in preventing large scale attacks between the time of disclosure and reaction (by the vendor). If Onity had been willing to replace all it's locks over a short period of time (say, 6 months) at massive cost to itself - but nevertheless done it to protect it's long term reputation, it makes a lot of sense to give Onity that opportunity without outing the flaw. It's unlikely that such a large-scale replacement of locks would have been pursued, but giving Onity an opportunity to consider that option would have been responsible. It helps Onity, but it also helps customers of Onity (like Hotels who might have chosen to replace their locks, or individuals who might ask questions before going to a particular hotel). Now everybody knows it can be done, and many will try. Sure, an NSA intern could have figured it out, but the fact remains that it was not being massively exploited for large-scale robberies, for e.g.. Targeted exploits are bad - no doubt - and I'm sure some of this was already going on, but there isn't much doubt that the sum total of targeted exploits does less bad than what might happen now - namely large scale exploits. I suppose I'm arguing that security-through-obscurity does work - but in a targeted and limited fashion - as to provide cover for short durations when real security is pursued. It may not work, but it's worth a try - and by going public before giving Onity a chance to pursue a 'fix', this researcher has, in my books, acted against public good.
-- obligatory (but true) caveat: my comments my own, and don't reflect my employer or colleagues' positions.
From TFA: He tested this hack on three randomly choosen hotel room doors, failed to open any. Had to stop to reprogram the device, and then managed to open one of the doors. I'll stick to being worried about corrupt security guards.
Proof of Concept != Final Version
Silly Reader, warrants are so 20th century. These days, they just show a letter, that you can't discuss with anyone, citing a "secret" law. Yes, it's unconstitutional, but if you're a $12/hour clerk, and the guy with the gun is asking, are you going to make a fuss?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
would it kill you to put on the veneer of respectability?
Like a banker? ;)