Hacking ZyXEL Gateways

An interesting paper recently published by Adrian Pastor of ProCheckup discusses vulnerabilities and attacks against ZyXEL gateways, including (yikes) Remote wardriving/attacking internal networks over the Internet, among others:

  • Privilege escalation from “user‟ to “admin‟ account
  • SNMP read and SNMP write access enabled by default
  • Persistent XSS via SNMP
  • Poor session management allows hijacking of admin sessions
  • Authentication vulnerable to replay and password cracking attacks
  • Disclosure of credentials

    • Considering the code reuse among various products made by most vendors of these residential gateways, not to mention the widespread deployment by service providers, I think it would be quite interesting for VOIPSA folks to expand on Adrian Pastor’s work and pursue this type of testing on some of the VoIP gateway products that ZyXEL offers, specifically the Analog Telephone Adapter, Station Gateway and Integrated Access Device to start. Also, the web interface of embedded devices like these are especially problemmatic from a security perspective, and it’s well worth a look at another one of Adrian Pastor’s papers over at OWASP.

    “So what” you might say about the security of these types of devices? Well, SANS diary notes some strange things afoot at the Circle K with Dlink, and there is the recent BT Home Hub CVE-2008-1334 vulnerability. More routers and details at GNU Citizen’s router hacking challenge.