Security News > 2020 > April > Connected Home Hubs Open Houses to Full Remote Takeover

Three different connected home hubs - Fibaro Home Center Lite, Homematic Central Control Unit and Elko's eLAN-RF-003 - are vulnerable in their older versions to serious bugs that would allow information disclosure, man-in-the-middle attacks and unauthenticated remote code execution, according to researchers.

Home hubs are used to connect a range of smart devices.

Researchers at ESET pointed out in Tuesday research that an attacker that compromises one of these could in theory gain full access to all of the peripheral devices connected to it - a scenario that could also impact businesses given that more people are working from home.

The problems included TLS connections that were vulnerable to MitM attacks thanks to a missing certificate validation - which would open the door to command injection; the use of very short, hardcoded password stored in the file /etc/shadow in the device's firmware, ripe for brute-forcing; the use of a hardcoded password salt; and a vulnerable weather service API that leaked the exact GPS coordinates of the device due to the use of unencrypted HTTP communications.

From there, attackers can intercept firmware updates and uncover the hardcoded root password, valid for all Fibaro Home Center Lite devices - can be "Trivially brute-forced," according to the security firm.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/connected-home-hubs-full-remote-takeover/155037/