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IoT Devices Are Secretly Phoning Home (thenewstack.io)
An anonymous reader writes: A popular internet-enabled security camera "secretly and constantly connects into a vast peer-to-peer network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware," according to security blogger Brian Krebs. While the device is not necessarily sharing video from your camera, it is punching through firewalls to connect with other devices. Even if the user discovers it, it's still extremely hard to turn off. Krebs notes that the same behavior has been detected in DVRs and smart plugs -- they're secretly connecting to the same IP address in China, apparently without any mention of this in the product's packaging. One security researcher told Krebs the behavior is an "insanely bad idea," and that it opens an attack vector into home networks.
It's really simple. It's separate from source code quality. If you have proprietary software running free on your device then you don't own the device, whoever set up the software owns it. Windows phones home because it's working for Microsoft. Your IOT devices phone home because they are working for a Chinese company. Your Android phone phones home because it's working for Samsung and your mobile operator. This is not different and it's not complicated.
This "secret network" is a "DDNS network" so you can more easily connect to your camera from the Internet. Clickbait.
That's it - the two peers are your camera and your mobile device, not some fast torrent network or something.
Now, sure, this could've been documented better, but Krebs should also know better than to jump to hyperbole based on two letters and a number in a configuration screen.
Here's a list of reasons why I don't like the Internet of Things:
1) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I sleep.
2) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I pee.
3) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I make kaka.
4) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I pleasure myself.
5) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I wash my body in the shower.
6) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I relax in the tub.
7) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I brush my teeth.
8) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I make passionate love to my wife.
9) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I brush my hair.
10) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I read a book.
11) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I read Slashdot.
12) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I bake cake.
13) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I put in my contact lenses.
14) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I get ready to play golf.
15) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I do my laundry.
16) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I think about rugby.
17) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I tie my shoes.
18) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I celebrate the 4th of July.
19) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I water my flowers.
20) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I eat ham.
21) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I use my stapler to staple documents.
22) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I chew bubble gum.
23) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I check the oil in my car.
24) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I look for my TV remote.
25) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I blow my nose.
26) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I rearrange my stamp collection.
27) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I listen to the Backstreet Boys.
28) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I do my calisthenics.
29) Internet of Things devices could watch me while I search for a paper clip.
30) Internet of Things devices could send information about me to advertisers.
31) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I sleep.
32) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I pee.
33) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I make kaka.
34) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I pleasure myself.
35) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I wash my body in the shower.
36) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I relax in the tub.
37) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I brush my teeth.
38) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I make passionate love to my wife.
39) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I brush my hair.
40) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I read a book.
41) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I read Slashdot.
42) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly collected about me while I bake cake.
43) Internet of Things devices could let advertisers use the data unsuspectingly coll
I'm sorry, but based on what we've been seeing, so far the entire Internet of Things is an insanely bad idea ... shoddy security by incompetent idiots who want more analytics data and ad revenue, and don't give a crap about your security.
Fuck that, I want my toaster connected to the internet why again?
That this is happening should no longer come as a surprise to anybody who has paid even the smallest amount of attention to how much of a mess the IoT is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I own a few Chinese IP cameras i bought for experimenting, and no two of them work with the same app/P2P cloud bullshit/whatever. They do, however, all expose Telnet and SSH to the world. There's no way I'd let them anywhere near the WAN because they're all running Linux on a decently snappy ARM SOC and phoning home. Can you say beach head?
Agreed. This doesn't surprise me one bit. Maybe the name gives it away... you know... that these Things communicate over the Internet?
I'm going to take a potentially contrary position, though, and argue that if a device is internet enabled, it absolutely should be phoning home on a regular basis, and for very good reasons. The recent glibc library vulnerability only helps to validate my opinion, in fact, which is that it's absolutely inevitable that serious vulnerabilities will be found in ANY internet-facing device, and so these devices MUST be able to automatically update themselves. What's more, manufacturers should be responsible for providing security updates for a reasonable product lifetime - otherwise, they're no longer fit to stay connected, and essentially must be discarded in order to keep your network secure.
I'm sure there are those who would argue against such a policy, but these are *consumer* devices, and we damn well know by now that a typical consumer will never update the firmware on their own device. We now accept that browsers must self-update in order to remain secure, and we're just now grappling with the notion that OSes must do it too. Frankly, anything that's internet-facing needs to be treated the same way. The manufacturer must take responsibility for this. Otherwise, we're going to have billions of tiny infection vectors that will last as long as the devices do, which could be decades. Look at how much of a problem this is for old desktops, servers, and routers sitting on the internet, spewing botnet-controlled traffic because they've never been updated. Granted, this has to be done in a secure manner, so that MITM attacks are not possible, but it's absolutely possible to do it right.
Of course, we all know what's really going to happen, which is that these companies with absolutely no clue how to do internet security are going to get many thousands of people infected through these crappy little internet-enabled gizmos, and the people who get infected with the Zeus banking trojan or crypto-ransomware will be outraged, and articles will be written, and eventually things *may* improve slightly. I'm sure as hell not going to be one of the early-adoption suckers.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Easy for the typical /. reader perhaps, not so much for your everyday consumer. Go ask random folks what a Vlan is and you'll understand pretty quickly.
The typical user isn't even aware of the possibility of this sort of thing.
Set up a honeypot consisting of a Chinese DVR and a bunch of security cams pointing at pictures of Minuteman ICBMs sitting in their silos. Sit back and watch your IP address get hacked.
Have gnu, will travel.
Then they don't work. Some have to have a 24/7 Internet connection, and if it gets cut, the devices turn off. I'm just waiting for everything out there, be it fridges, TVs, and anything else to either follow suit, or have a 3G antenna, so it has its own private pipe to tattle user info on.
Perhaps an even better thing would be to go to a hub and spoke topology? That way, devices can communicate with the center hub (or hubs, if redundancy is desired), and if there is a fix, the hub asks for it on behalf of one device, caches it, so other devices can use that same fix without issue. It is basically what happens when devices communicate through an access point, but the devices would use a low power, low range protocol as opposed to Wi-Fi, or even opening themselves for attack by touching the Internet directly. Plus, with a hub and spoke, an IDS/IPS mechanism can be places so if one device starts behaving suspiciously that is out of the design parameters (nmapping everything it can find), its connection gets dropped, and life goes on. As an added bonus, an attacker would either have to be physically nearer to intercept the low power protocol, or would have to attack the hardened hub (which could run on fairly modest hardware and use virtual machines to separate the firewall instance from the instance that deals with the devices.)