IoT : The Rise of the Machines

[This blogpost has also been published as a guest diary on isc.sans.org]

Our houses and offices are more and more infested by electronic devices embedding a real computer with an operating system and storage. They are connected to network resources for remote management, statistics or data polling. This is called the “Internet of Things” or “IoT“. My home network is hardened and any new (unknown) device connected to it receives an IP address from a specific range which has no connectivity with other hosts or the Internet but its packets are logged. The goal is to detect suspicious activity like data leaks or unexpected firmware updates. The last toy I bought yesterday is a Smart Plug from Supra-Electronics. This device allows you to control a power plug via your mobile device and calculate the energy consumption with nice stats. I had a very good opportunity to buy one for a very low price (25€). Let’s see what’s inside…

The documentation mentions a setup procedure and management via a mobile device (with a free app for IOS or Android) but the first reflex is to scan the box. Interesting, a webserver as well as a telnet server are waiting for packets. Let’s try common credentials like admin/admin and…

$ telnet 192.168.254.225
Trying 192.168.254.225...
Connected to 192.168.254.225.
Escape character is '^]'.

(none) login: admin
Password:

BusyBox v1.12.1 (2014-07-31 06:32:52 CEST) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
#

Immediately after the boot sequence, the device started to try to communicate with remote hosts:

Amongst DNS requests and NTP synchronization, a lot of traffic was generated to different IP addresses over UDP/10001. The same packet being sent to different hosts. The payload was a block of 60 bytes:

I was not able to decode the content of this payload, please comment if you recognize some patterns. The device also performs a regular connectivity check via a single ICMP ECHO packet sent to www.google.com (every 5 mins). This network traffic is generated by the process called RDTServer:

# ps
 PID USER       VSZ STAT COMMAND
   1 admin     1400 S    init 
   2 admin        0 SWN  [ksoftirqd/0]
   3 admin        0 SW<  [events/0]
   4 admin        0 SW<  [khelper]
   5 admin        0 SW<  [kthread]
   6 admin        0 SW<  [kblockd/0]
   7 admin        0 SW<  [kswapd0]
   8 admin        0 SW   [pdflush]
   9 admin        0 SW   [pdflush]
  10 admin        0 SW<  [aio/0]
  11 admin        0 SW   [mtdblockd]
  18 admin     1084 S    nvram_daemon 
  19 admin     1612 S    goahead 
  20 admin      872 R    RDTServer 
  24 admin     1400 R    telnetd 
  26 admin      872 S    RDTServer 
  27 admin      872 S    RDTServer 
  33 admin      872 S    RDTServer 
  34 admin      872 S    RDTServer 
  35 admin      872 S    RDTServer 
  36 admin      872 S    RDTServer 
  53 admin     1400 S    /bin/sh 
 238 admin        0 SW   [RtmpCmdQTask]
 239 admin        0 SW   [RtmpWscTask]
 366 admin     1400 S    -sh 
 505 admin     1400 R    ps 
 678 admin     1400 S    udhcpd /etc/udhcpd.conf 
 1116 admin    1396 S    udhcpc -i apcli0 -s /sbin/udhcpc.sh -p /var/run/udhcp
 1192 admin     872 S    RDTServer 
 1207 admin     772 S    ntpclient -s -c 0 -h ntp.belnet.be -i 86400 
#

I grabbed a copy of the RDTServer binary (Mips) and using the “strings” command against the file revealed interesting stuff. The IP addresses used were found in the binary:

Seeing packets sent to China is often suspicious! The domain name iotcplatform.com belongs to ThroughTek, a company specialized in IoT and M2M (“Machine to Machine“) connection platforms:

Domain Name: IOTCPLATFORM.COM
Registry Domain ID: 1665166563_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Update Date: 2014-07-09T11:44:15Z
Creation Date: 2011-07-04T08:50:36Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2016-07-04T08:50:36Z
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.480-624-2505
Registry Registrant ID: 
Registrant Name: Charles Kao
Registrant Organization: 
Registrant Street: 4F., No.221, Chongyang Rd.,
Registrant City: Taipei
Registrant State/Province: Nangang District
Registrant Postal Code: 11573
Registrant Country: Taiwan
Registrant Phone: +886.886226535111
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: 
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: justin_yeh@tutk.com

In fact, the IOTC platform is a service developed by ThoughTek to establish P2P communications between devices. I read the documentation provided with the device as well as all the website pages and there is no mention of this service. Manufacturers should include some technical documentation about the network requirements (ex: to download firmware updates). In this case, it’s not a major security issue but this story enforces what we already know (and be afraid) about IoT: those devices have weak configuration and they lack of visibility/documentation about their behavior. Take care when connecting them on your network. A best practice is to inspect the traffic they generate once online (DNS requests, HTTP(S) request or any other protocol).