I closed the case of a vulnerability in the Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH
with a confirmation from the vendor that this is a device completely out of
support. Which confirms the public information I found
when I started looking into this device.
This was all related to the course in hardware hacking I took and applying
the new knowledge.
So now I can look back on this experience and think about my future here.
Hardware hacking has serious links to my current job as technical security
specialist. In my work I regularly have to look at vulnerabilities and assess
the chance and impact of misuse of the vulnerability. With hardware hacking
I find vulnerabilities by researching hardware. This helps me understand the
chance and impact factor of other vulnerabilities.
There is also a link to my education: part of that was MTS electronics. I
learned how to solder, before SMD components were a thing and I think I got
some explanation about switching mode power supplies at the end. As I got into
computers I didn't do much with this education but the last years in amateur
radio have made me get out the soldering iron again.
There is a clear link to my hobby of amateur radio. My interest in amateur
radio is linked to wanting to know how things actually work. Hardware hacking
is also done with RF signals so I may get into more RF related hardware
hacking.
My current thought is that I want to continue in this subject. It's given me
joy: getting into a device in new and unexpected ways gives joy! I have learned
new things. I noticed I need to feed the brain regularly with new information
and actually learning something new is much better brainfood than browsing
social media. At the same time social media is the way to learn
more about this subject and interact with other people interested in this
subject. I ended up on /r/hardwarehacking on reddit
and already learned from others and shared some of my own insights!
There is the thing about RFID/NFC security. I have looked into this in the
past, mostly by getting the tools to peek into the MiFare classic cards. I am
considering going further with this area of hardware hacking. Prices of hacking
tools for this area like the proxmark3 or the flipper zero are above the 'nice
to try a few things' level. On the other hand I think I could have loads of fun
there, and the overlap with amateur radio is very clear.
At the end of this bit of writing: thanks to people who share their hardware
hacking experiences on-line! Thanks to Jilles
Groenendijk, Router Archeology: Sitecom WL-330 - Habbie's journal,
@Flashback Team on youtube,
Make Me Hack on youtube,
and Boschko Security for sharing
their stories and knowledge.
Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH side with warrantylabel. The warranty was voided.
This week I was attending a course in hardware hacking: HackLab: Hardware Hacking
at the Deloitte office in Den Haag.
How to find the right pins to get a commandline on a router-like device was
part of this course, and the last day there was an option to Bring Your Own
Device, to hack it. So I brought this router as I thought it was an ideal
target to get access to it, since on the earlier try
I could not get into the webinterface of the Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH device.
Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH opened boards visible
So this time I took out the screwdriver, voided the warranty of the device by
breaking the little sticker on the side and opening it. It has a board with the
powersupply and cable interface parts. The powersupply is shielded with some
plastic.
There is a smaller board with the main chip which contains the processor,
ram, wifi module. The first task was to find the uart interface which should
give a serial console. That's a skill I learned in the hacklab: first find
out which pins have continuity to ground with the device switched off. With
a simple multimeter which has a beeping continuity meter this is simple.
The beep makes it possible to test the device without looking at the meter.
After that it's a matter of switching the multimeter to voltage and checking
other pins for voltage. Usually there are 4 pins on a uart port: ground
which is physically connected to the device ground, receive data and send
data and a reference voltage. On measuring the pins the reference voltage will
be at the steady maximum voltage, the data transmitting from the device will
be varying and the pin where the device expects data will be at 0 volt.
Uart ports can be 5 volt, 3.3 volt, 2.5 volt or 1.8 volt in recent devices.
5 and 3.3 volt are the most common. USB serial interfaces that support 5
and 3.3 volt are cheap (3 euro), USB serial interfaces that support all 4 are
somewhat more expensive (10 euro).
For the Corinex router the voltage is 3.3 Volt. There was a 3.3 Volt ftdi USB
to serial interface available, so I was able to access the uart port. I
connected to the uart port, used a terminal program and searched for the right
serial port settings and ended up at 57600 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stopbit.
After looking at all the boot messages I was greeted with a root prompt. No
more hacking, just full access. The system boots using the U-Boot bootloader.
The system runs linux with a 2.6.21 kernel. I looked around on the filesystem
and started looking for the configuration for the webserver hoping to find the
username/password. I found this in /flash/config so I could get into
that interface as well.
I also found it was running a telnet server, but not on the standard port. The
port was 32560. Without commands like netstat or ss I had to
learn this from /proc/net/tcp. Browsing the iptables listing shows
that port 80 is supposed to be allowed and other ports aren't, but 32560 reacts
fine.
Chip found: Ralink RT3052F processor with embedded ram and flash and with
2.4 GHz wifi and a network switch for 1 gigabit port and 5 100 mbit ports.
Things I'd still like to do: copy the entire filesystem to another computer
so I can research it and check around the web interface for security issues.
After digging into setting up radius and WPA Enterprise with an Asus WL300g accesspoint
the next step was to peek into the traffic on a client.
For that part I used a linux machine with a wired and wireless interface and
used tcpdump to try to capture the wireless authentication packets.
I configured /etc/network/interfaces
for wpa enterprise, based on the eduroam examples.
And this worked, starting the capture:
And I typed in another window 'ifup wlan0'. This resulted in a capture with
the right Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) packets included:
root@ritchie:~# tcpdump -nr wlanstart.pcap -v
reading from file wlanstart.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
16:47:39.658963 EAP packet (0) v2, len 5, Request (1), id 0, len 5
Type Identity (1)
16:47:39.660863 EAP packet (0) v1, len 25, Response (2), id 0, len 25
Type Identity (1), Identity: anonymous@idefix.net
16:47:39.662840 IP6 (hlim 1, next-header Options (0) payload length: 56) :: > ff02::16: HBH (rtalert: 0x0000) (padn) [icmp6 sum ok] ICMP6, multicast listener report v2, 2 group record(s) [gaddr ff02::1:ff23:123 to_in, 0 source(s)] [gaddr ff02::1:ff84:afe0 to_ex, 0 source(s)]
16:47:39.668736 EAP packet (0) v2, len 6, Request (1), id 1, len 6
Type TTLS (21) TTLSv0 flags [Start bit] 0x20,
16:47:39.670420 EAP packet (0) v1, len 6, Response (2), id 1, len 6
Type Nak (3) unknown (25),
16:47:39.682125 EAP packet (0) v2, len 6, Request (1), id 2, len 6
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.741150 EAP packet (0) v1, len 203, Response (2), id 2, len 203
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.756343 EAP packet (0) v2, len 1004, Request (1), id 3, len 1004
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.756598 EAP packet (0) v1, len 6, Response (2), id 3, len 6
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.834920 EAP packet (0) v2, len 1000, Request (1), id 4, len 1000
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.835159 EAP packet (0) v1, len 6, Response (2), id 4, len 6
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.842070 EAP packet (0) v2, len 1000, Request (1), id 5, len 1000
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.842318 EAP packet (0) v1, len 6, Response (2), id 5, len 6
Type unknown (25)
16:47:39.866174 EAP packet (0) v2, len 79, Request (1), id 6, len 79
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.006260 EAP packet (0) v1, len 144, Response (2), id 6, len 144
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.014338 EAP packet (0) v2, len 65, Request (1), id 7, len 65
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.016467 EAP packet (0) v1, len 6, Response (2), id 7, len 6
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.028765 EAP packet (0) v2, len 43, Request (1), id 8, len 43
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.029290 EAP packet (0) v1, len 96, Response (2), id 8, len 96
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.036381 EAP packet (0) v2, len 75, Request (1), id 9, len 75
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.043383 EAP packet (0) v1, len 144, Response (2), id 9, len 144
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.057720 EAP packet (0) v2, len 91, Request (1), id 10, len 91
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.058739 EAP packet (0) v1, len 80, Response (2), id 10, len 80
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.071176 EAP packet (0) v2, len 43, Request (1), id 11, len 43
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.072087 EAP packet (0) v1, len 80, Response (2), id 11, len 80
Type unknown (25)
16:47:40.082689 EAP packet (0) v2, len 4, Success (3), id 11, len 4
16:47:40.082865 EAPOL key (3) v2, len 117
16:47:40.091607 EAPOL key (3) v1, len 117
16:47:40.107041 EAPOL key (3) v2, len 175
16:47:40.107839 EAPOL key (3) v1, len 95
At the same time I captured the radius traffic. Now time to correlate those
two traffic streams in wireshark.
For work I am looking into how Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)actually works down to the byte level, to be able to explain
what actually happens and where the security strenghts and weaknesses are.
To set this up I need a separation between the access-point and the
authentication server. I dug up an old Asus WL300g access-point and looked at
FreeRADIUS as authentication,
authorization and auditing (AAA) server. I followed the A very basic (but functional) eduroam configuration - FreeRADIUS wiki
guide to get to a working setup, but with different passwords.
Getting the access-point to talk to a radius server took a bit of searching
and trying: I assumed that "802.1x" which is extended to "Radius with 802.1x"
was the right mode to use a radius server in the background, but it turned out
this didn't do what I want. I saw no communication with the radius server and
I didn't see the SSID advertised.
The right mode is "WPA" and things started to work that way. It still needs a
few settings to talk to the radius server: IP address, port and shared secret.
I chose to go the 'eduroam' way because that is what I am used to from work.
This does mean I had to set a home domain idefix.net for
authentication. With eduroam I also get Extensible Authentication Protol
(EAP) extensions to handle with the real user data. The result is an
outer authentication layer visible to the first radius server in the path
and an inner authentication layer only visible to the final radius server in
the path. Although both the outer and the inner authentication servers run
on the same freeradius server they are separate configurations with a trust
relation between them.
The traffic to the inner authentication server is wrapped in TLS and needs a
certificate. I used LetsEncrypt to generate a trusted certificate. I noticed
I am at a point where generating a valid LetsEncrypt certificate was easier
for me than fiddling with self-signed certificates. So I could set up my
phone to require a valid certificate for radius.idefix.net.
All of this worked and I had a WPA Enterprise connection with the access-point
and a lot of debug logging in freeradius.
My next plan is to find some computer with a network card where I can run
wpa_supplicant while at the same time grabbing all the raw 802.11
frames and analyzing/understanding the traffic. I will also look at the
radius traffic between access-point and outer radius server, and the radius
traffic between outer and inner radius server.
Years and years after writing proposals to start doing something with IPv6
at work I noticed the first systems actually having IPv6 connectivity in
production networks.
Finally getting there! I wonder when workstations will start having IPv6
connectivity.
Today I tried to sign a key with my work PGP key, and after lots of tries the
conclusion was that my 2006 work pgp key was too infected with SHA1 signatures
that I couldn't remove, so I created a replacement work PGP key. Even a
signature for the new key with the old key was rejected.
So the new work key:
pub rsa4096/0x36FF19C6159C0262 2022-02-15 [SC] [expires: 2027-02-14]
Key fingerprint = 1401 EE9F 25AD 23F1 C299 FD07 36FF 19C6 159C 0262
uid [ultimate] Koos van den Hout <k.vandenhout(at)uu.nl>
uid [ultimate] Koos van den Hout <koos(at)surfcert.nl>
sub rsa4096/0x918F8E7A170EA93E 2022-02-15 [E] [expires: 2027-02-14]
I also signed it with my personal key, and I will try to get more signatures
for the new work key to make things work better. Available at
PGP key 0x36ff19c6159c0262.
There you will see I also signed it with my old work key 0x42216fe29ee949cf
but since that signature is also a SHA1 signature the new gpg implementation
immediately rejects it. So I should get some signatures from people who have
relatively new PGP keys. I've been using PGP since 1993 (29 years now!) and
I can see the developments in PGP over the years in my keys.
In the process I noticed one thunderbird installation insists on managing
PGP keys completely and the other doesn't. Searching for the reason
eventually found Use Thunderbird 78 with System GnuPG Keyring
and I made sure the option mail.openpgp.allow_external_gnupg was set
to true.
A large part of last weekend was filled with the log4j vulnerability at work.
Now I have some more time to look at the effect this has had on my home server
I'm seeing a patter of lots of 'friendly' scanners with a few actual attack
attempts in between.
Some special ones from the logs:
Trying all the fields (URL, referrer and user-agent), probably a 'friendly'
scanner:
Trying to circumvent web application firewalls that have been set up with
simple rules against the log4j vulnerability. I'm not sure whether this is
a 'friendly' scanner or an actual attempt at abuse.
But I haven't been able to fetch anything from 45.155.205.233:5874 yet and I'm
getting really curious what it is/was. The other IP address is the external
address of the server, so I guess it's a way to make curl/wget not return
an error code.
For work I use a supplied laptop with Windows 10. For some of my work I want
to have a Linux environment available so I have VirtualBox with a Linux
virtual machine running. And because some of the work I do on that Linux
virtual machine I use full-disk encryption. And the installation was done
with the encrypted lvm setting.
Resizing the filesystem because it was getting full turned out to be a lot
of steps! After stopping the virtual machine I wanted to resize the disk from
the VirtualBox media manager but that gave an error. After that I tried the
commandline, giving about the same error:
> "\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" modifymedium rotterdam.vdi --resize 32768
0%...
Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED
VBoxManage.exe: error: Failed to resize medium
VBoxManage.exe: error: Resizing to new size 34359738368 is not yet supported for medium 'C:\Users\hout0101\VirtualBox VMs\rotterdam\rotterdam.vdi'
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED (0x80bb0009), component MediumWrap, interface IMedium
VBoxManage.exe: error: Context: "enum RTEXITCODE __cdecl handleModifyMedium(struct HandlerArg *)" at line 816 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp
It turns out the .vdi is the wrong type for dynamic resizing. Solution:
clone it! The new .vdi will have the dynamic type automatically and there is
a "before" .vdi now on disk to revert to if anything goes wrong.
> "\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" showhdinfo rotterdam.vdi
UUID: f832b0b4-8738-491d-bd9c-291d755a4af7
Parent UUID: base
State: created
Type: normal (base)
Location: C:\Users\hout0101\VirtualBox VMs\rotterdam\rotterdam.vdi
Storage format: VDI
Format variant: fixed default
Capacity: 26067 MBytes
Size on disk: 26070 MBytes
Encryption: disabled
Property: AllocationBlockSize=1048576
In use by VMs: rotterdam (UUID: 2454dadb-a82d-4d74-bbea-8dcf2b2d1bf1)
> "\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" clonehd rotterdam.vdi rotterdam-2.vdi
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
Clone medium created in format 'VDI'. UUID: 835e2f75-c19d-4e98-865e-d7acf1359fc7
> "\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" showhdinfo rotterdam-2.vdi
UUID: 835e2f75-c19d-4e98-865e-d7acf1359fc7
Parent UUID: base
State: created
Type: normal (base)
Location: C:\Users\hout0101\VirtualBox VMs\rotterdam\rotterdam-2.vdi
Storage format: VDI
Format variant: dynamic default
Capacity: 26067 MBytes
Size on disk: 26069 MBytes
Encryption: disabled
Property: AllocationBlockSize=1048576
> "\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" modifymedium rotterdam-2.vdi --resize 32768
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
I moved the old .vdi out of the way and added the new .vdi to the virtual
machine and started it again. This worked fine, but the root volume wasn't any
bigger (yet). Next steps: enlarge the extended partition and the Linux
partition in it on disk using parted. You really have to know what you are
doing here, so I'm not just going to give a cut-and-paste sample.
Now I can resize the encrypted and mounted volume! With the right passphrase.
# cryptsetup resize /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt
And grow the 'physical' (ahem) volume:
# pvresize /dev/mapper/sda5_crypt
Resize the logical volume:
# lvextend /dev/rotterdam-vg/root -l +1674
And finally resize the mounted filesystem:
# resize2fs /dev/mapper/rotterdam--vg-root
And the filesystem has grown, and looks good in a fsck on the next boot.
So solid state disk → Windows filesystem → vdi file →
VirtualBox → disk in Linux virtual machine → partition →
lukscrypt → logical volume manager → volume → filesystem.
Today I ran into an issue related to systemd and I decided to try to fix it
without too much cursing. The result was a number of google searches ending
up on unix.stackexchange.com
but eventually I fixed the problem.
At work we use splunk for security monitoring and one of the indexers failed
to start the splunk processes after a reboot. On browsing the systemd boot
log with journalctl -b -l I discovered that the main issue was that
creating files in /opt/splunk failed. This was due to an interesting
race condition: splunk may start as soon as target network.target
has been reached, but mounting /opt over iscsi also needs
network.target to start. So the unit file has been updated to:
[Unit]
Description=Systemd service file for Splunk, generated by 'splunk enable boot-start'
After=network.target opt.mount
The next problem was the systemctl start Splunkd.service failing in
some intricate way. I had a look at the logging and saw that it was actually
trying to restart the service and failed at killing one of the old processes.
It turned out the /opt/splunk/var/run/splunk/splunkd.pid file had old
contents and one of the PIDs in that file was now in use by a kernel thread.
Those you can't kill, the restart failed and therefore the service did not
start at all. Solution: remove the .pid file.
For almost 20 years I was involved with the running of NTP time servers at
work. But the hardware aged and my job is no longer in systems administration
and not in the department actually housing the timeservers.
So, time to stop doing it. The pool ntp server has been retracted, DNS names
removed and soon I will make one final trip to shut down hardware one last time
and remove it from racks. The end for ntp.cs.uu.nl and others.
I still run an NTP server at home which is available in the IPv6 NTP pool.
That server also compared itself to one of the servers at work so it has been
reconfigured. I added a few upstream servers and made sure all of them are
reachable via IPv6.
The log of NTP service at cs.uu.nl was kept, here is the final version:
Date
Event
8 Apr 2021
DNS names for ntp service at cs.uu.nl removed
2 Apr 2021
Announcement posted to system administration mailing list that ntp service at cs.uu.nl will stop
24 Sep 2014
A second stratum-1 ntp appliance is brought on-line, galileo.cs.uu.nl
28 Nov 2011
Fixed the networking for stardate, the full time lab is up and running.
23 Nov 2011
The antenna cable connectors are soldered on which
results in a working setup after a few tries. Stardate is better at reporting
the state of the power to the GPS antenna, but has no working network. Huygens
has working network and serves time to metronoom.
22 Nov 2011
The server ntp.cs.uu.nl is active at its new IP. Our own GPS reference doesn't work yet: we still need to solder the right connectors on the antenna cable. The server is added to the ntp pool and traffic starts to flow a few hours later.
15 Nov 2011
The ntp servers are moved to their new location
14 Nov 2011
The ntp servers are switched off
13 Nov 2011
We retract ntp.cs.uu.nl at its current address from the pool because the serverroom will move physically, the ntp equipment will
move to a different location and the IP will change to deal with the traffic better
18 Sep 2011
Stats for doei.cs.uu.nl, five years after withdrawing it from the ntp pool
19 Sep 2010
Stats for doei.cs.uu.nl, four years after withdrawing it from the ntp pool
4 Mar 2010
The turkish adsl provider ttnet falls off the Internet for a few hours, traffic falls from 2000 packets/second to 100 packets/second in that time
22 Jan 2010
We volunteer ntp.cs.uu.nl for the turkish part of the ntp pool. Traffic explodes, peaks over 5000 packets/second
18 Sep 2009
Stats for doei.cs.uu.nl, three years after withdrawing it from the ntp pool
28 Jul 2009
ntp.cs.uu.nl back at full speed in the ntp pool, firewall configuration fixed
15 Jul 2009
rear doors of racks closed again
2 Jul 2009 10:00
serverroom airco has problems with high temperatures (28-30 C), we open rear doors of racks which makes the temperature go down a bit in the racks but the airco still has hard work
Mar 2009
ntp.cs.uu.nl tuned down in the ntp pool to avoid firewall issue
18 Sep 2008
Stats for doei.cs.uu.nl, two years after withdrawing it from the ntp pool
17 Jan 2008
huygens.cs.uu.nl has a GPS reception failure, fixed
with a software update
18 Sep 2007
Stats for doei.cs.uu.nl, a year after withdrawing it from the ntp pool
11 Mar 2007
airco failure serverroom
5 Mar 2007
all ntp servers moved to one rack close together for temperature stability
20 Jan 2007
airco failure serverroom
9 Jan 2007
huygens.cs.uu.nl added as stratum-1
23 Dec 2006
airco failure serverroom
29 Nov 2006
powerfailure in our building
1 Nov 2006
metronoom.dmz.cs.uu.nl takes over as ntp.cs.uu.nl and joins pool.ntp.org
~ 24 Oct 2006
antenna cable to stardate.cs.uu.nl reconnected
~ 6 Oct 2006
ntpd on stardate disabled: free running clock starts to differ too much from correct time
~ 25 Aug 2006
antenna cable from stardate.cs.uu.nl disconnected because of building and recabling activities
1 Aug 2006
doei.cs.uu.nl leaves pool.ntp.org
19 Aug 2003
doei.cs.uu.nl joins pool.ntp.org
10 Jan 1999
stardate.cs.uu.nl set up as stratum-1 with GPS time reference
Today I tried to sign a key with my work PGP key, and after lots of tries the conclusion was that my 2006 work pgp key was too infected with SHA1 signatures that I couldn't remove, so I created a replacement work PGP key. Even a signature for the new key with the old key was rejected. So the new work key:
Today I tried to sign a key with my work PGP key, and after lots of tries the
conclusion was that my 2006 work pgp key was too infected with SHA1 signatures
that I couldn't remove, so I created a replacement work PGP key. Even a
signature for the new key with the old key was rejected.
So the new work key: