Black Hat Asia 2014: Dangers of hacking IoT devices

Twenty-six billion devices in the internet-of-things (IoT) may not be wrong but can they be secure?

We all know that computers can be hacked and so three presentations at Black Hat Asia 2014 in Singapore later this month on the dangers of hacking internet-enabled hardware will be of specific interest to anyone developing IoT technology.

It used to be that most of us would only worry about corporate computers being hacked. But as more consumer products increasingly incorporate networking features, that concern should extend to door locks, thermostats, baby monitors.

In Abusing the Internet of Things: Blackouts, Freakouts, and Stakeouts, Nitesh Dhanjani will delve into (and demonstrate) critical vulnerabilities in home automation products.

From spying through a baby monitor to remotely causing a blackout in your home or office building, this talk breaks open an array of high impact attack vectors. What are the security requirements of a next-generation device infrastructure?

In recent times the term, “Trojan horse,” has primarily described disguised malware, but in Building Trojan Hardware at Home, JP Dunning will bring the concept back to the physical arena.

Almost any computer peripheral can be turned into an attack platform and surprisingly you don’t even need advanced hardware expertise to make it happen.

Dunning will showcase his own hardware attack platform dubbed, ‘The Glitch,’ designed to embed into existing hardware, while also covering the threats of modified firmware as a staging point inside corporate networks.

How much do you trust you phone? (If you’re coming to Black Hat, we can take a guess.) The average person is unaware of just how much uniquely identifying information leaks from a smartphone, much less how it can be harnessed for attacks.

The Machines That Betrayed Their Masters will walk you through how Glenn Wilkinson built a resilient, modular, reliable, distributed tracking framework, Snoopy, which has not only expanded into vectors beyond Wi-Fi, but is now airborne via a quadcopter.