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Millions of Smart TVs Vulnerable To 'Red Button' Attack
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Columbia University's Network Security Lab discovered a flaw affecting millions of Smart TVs supporting the HbbTV standard. The flaw allows a radio-frequency attacker with a low budget to take control over tens of thousands of TVs in a single attack, forcing the TVs to interact with any website on their behalf — Academic paper available online."
Yes, I RTFA. And the responsible consortium knows about the bug and doesn't consider it "important" enough to warrant a change because it's "not cost efficient" to execute an attack.
It is.
If all it takes is to weave a signal into the program, there are SO many places where this can take place that it's literally trivial to execute. Aside of the idea they present themselves, i.e. a 1MW transmitter used to infect a rather small area, how about using the broadcast itself? Yes, that means that you have to gain access to the show when or before it is aired, but considering just how many people are concerned with the creation of TV programming, having an "inside man" is fairly trivial. From production to cutting to storage to preparation to the actual broadcast, a show goes through many, many hands, every single thereof having the chance to inject the signal without anyone noticing before it's too late.
Now add that the more recent history taught us that governments are certainly not above abusing such a flaw and tell me again that there is "no need for concern".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So the idea is that the attacker overrides the RF signal with his own one, which contains the malicious data. The client TV then automatically interprets the HTML from the transport stream metadata. Provided that the attack was successful, a bunch of TVs can for example be controlled to access a certain website through HTTP requests, causing a denial of service attack for that website.
Right. There is little need for TVs that tune or are smart anymore. Just need a monitor. Let separate upgradeable or replaceable devices handle video sources. Today's Smart TVs are like yesterday's TVs with the built in DVD player.
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits.
I've been doing audits for a rather long while now. Few companies have sensors on their inside.
In other words, it will be easy to find out THAT something went on after the incident. Who did it, otoh, is an entirely different matter. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get into a lot of companies and move about unhindered with the right uniform and the "I belong here" attitude.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"All it'd take to do this is walk into the room and swap a commercial with one with the attack embedded."
I managed the Cable TV systems for commercial insertion for 10 years, so tell me again how easy it is to swap a TV commercial? Because all the AD insertion servers are password protected and also in locked racks that you have to get through first. Are you an uber haxor? where hacking a server is a 30 second trivial thing and then you know the Ad insertion software suite (Seachange By the way for all you Uber Hax0rs) so well that you carry the client insertion apps with you on your laptop? Oh and what file format did you encode that TV commercial? Because you need the right format for the system setup, no it's not the same nation wide.
In fact it's easier for you to pick a far less protected network location, Like a sales office, Get hired on the cleaning crew and attack the network from there to try and gain access to the encode and upload station at the main ad insertion office. If you are lucky, that one was set up by IT retards and is on both the corporate network and the ad insertion network (ad insertion network is a protected and isolated network)
A far more plausable route is social engineering while wearing a suit and having a lot of money. Contact a sales person for AD insertion, buy Air time and supply them with a Pre Encoded TV commercial that is already set up for their systems file and encoding settings. A file that hopefully they will just drop in the system and not run through any video re-encoding software that will destroy or strip your evil info. faking urgency and throwing a lot of cash at the sales person increases the chances of just a straight file copy, but that is against SOP and has a high possibility of failing. But then Places like Comcast pay nearly minimum wage for the poor guys that do video conversion and upload, so if done late in the day the chance that they will just copy and call it done is high.
Just swap a TV commercial..... That's Hilarious, this is not 1993 when you had racks full of video tapes for the TV commercials.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When you make cheap, shitty, under-engineered, non-compatible systems that can't be commodotized because everyone is banking on their propriety system taking off and cornering the market... that you'll end up with a cheap, shitty, under-engineered system with major security flaws?
Yet another reason why Smart TVs are worse than useless.
The TS most likely re-written on final broadcast. If it is going out OTA, then the transmitter will repack the data as ATSC, regroom the MPEG2 content, and rewrite the PAT at the tower (usually with a custom PID for each video stream, a PID for DATA, etc, to make it consistent at the viewer's side). So changes are low there.
Since most CATV providers require a STB, very few TVs are using the ClearQAM streams directly (usually encrypted streams that require an handshaked box). Those very few that are using a CableCARD or equivalent are probably in such a minority you might not even want to bother. Oh, and the streams are re-packed when they are encrypted so garbage data is probably removed at that point.
Oh, and good luck "just walking into a CATV headend and replacing commercials." Every CATV headend that I've seen (including the one I run), don't store the commercials there, let alone have any way to change them. Those are usually controlled up-stream in some no-name office remotely then muxed or pulled in by the groomers or stat-muxers (depending on how they are setup).
Actually it requires about $200 and nothing more.
http://www.hides.com.tw/produc...
Bundled Opencaster offers point and click HbbTV support.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Heh. Well, I'm kinda proud of our security staff, they even sent a board member back (despite said board member ranting and raving about how he'll ensure the security person be fired) because he forgot his access card.
And yes, the board member actually demanded him to be fired. When I asked him if he really wants me to fire one of our guards on grounds of him doing his job and following the security protocol unlike a certain board member who expected and ordered the guard to break security protocol, suddenly he had to leave in a hurry... dunno why...
I LOVE working in a company where security trumps productivity.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thanks for the comments. I hope I can clarify some of the things people said here.
Re popularity of OTA vs. cable: Cable is more popular in the US, but that's just the US. Digital Terrestrial is much more common in other places - for example it's the most popular delivery method in Europe by far (page 39) . In the US immigrants use it a lot more than US-born.
To whomever suggested attacks via the remote control's IR port: that sounds a lot of fun to try, but the IR receiver's much less sensitive than the RF jack, it has a much lower data rate, and it needs line of sight.
About the power calculations: 1 Watt (0 dBm) can cover an area of 1.4 square Kilometers, under reasonable assumptions. The math is in the paper.
One last thing: A big shout-out to Martin Herfurt, whose work on HbbTV security was our starting point.
In this case, it's more like "Oh no, I've been inconvenienced as a direct result of someone else's negligent actions."
If the end result of TV manufacturers not releasing a more secure firmware for the affected models is your TV running malicious code that, say, simply bricks your TV, they should be liable for repair or replacement costs. If the result is that your TV ends up running code that hacks into your computer and steals your financial and personal details, they should likewise be liable for any resulting fraud and the cost of cleaning up that mess. In both cases, maybe a little something for the trouble, as well; it's best for society that we discourage purposeful negligence like this.
We're not talking about simply missing a TV show here; there are real and potentially damaging implications here.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
So the idea is that the attacker overrides the RF signal with his own one, which contains the malicious data.
No. They are actually overriding the DVB broadcast signal from the broadcaster and inserting malicious packets into the stream.
Abstract: In the attempt to bring modern broadband Internet features to traditional broadcast television, the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) consortium introduced a specification called Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband Television (HbbTV), which allows broadcast streams to include embedded HTML content which is rendered by the television. This system is already in very wide deployment in Europe, and has recently been adopted as part of the American digital television standard.
All of the references to the "red button" on the remote are a distraction that can be confusing. The red button on your remote is simply a way that you can invoke or interact with the hybrid content in the broadcast stream. It has nothing to do with the actual attack and the embedded content doesn't need to be actual interactive content.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Abstract: In the attempt to bring modern broadband Internet features to traditional broadcast television, the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) consortium introduced a specification called Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband Television (HbbTV), which allows broadcast streams to include embedded HTML content which is rendered by the television.
And for anyone wondering just why the hell anyone would want this, TFA clarifies:
Broadcasters and advertisers have been eager to use the HbbTV to target ads more precisely and add interactive content, polls, shopping and apps, to home viewers.
So let me get this right... "Punch the Monkey", coming to a TV near you? Flashing and bouncing "Take the "Which Ninja Turtle are you most like?" poll for a chance to win $1000!!!"? Malicious "Your TV isn't secure! Click here to upgrade!" ads that install some bullshit TV "app" that does only god-knows-what? Remote scripting running on a device designed without any security in mind, and which will probably never be updated during its 8+ year lifetime?
How can I make this clear? Do. Not. Fucking. Want. Yet another reason to avoid "smart" TVs, I guess.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Another effective mechanism, is to Decline the privacy policy. According to a recent Slashdot post, that disables pretty much every smart feature the TV has.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".