Breaking Google Home: Exploit It with SQLite(Magellan)

DEF CON 27

Presented by: YuXiang Li, Wenxiang Qian, HuiYu Wu
Date: Thursday August 08, 2019
Time: 11:00 - 11:45
Location: Paris Theatre

Over the past years, our team has used several new approaches to identify multiple critical vulnerabilities in SQLite and Curl, two of the most widely used basic software libraries. These two sets of vulnerabilities, which we named "Magellan" and "Dias" respectively, affect many devices and software. We exploited these vulnerabilities to break into some of the most popular Internet of things devices, such as Google Home with Chrome. We also exploited them on one of the most widely used Web server (Apache+PHP) and one of the most commonly used developer tool (Git).

In this presentation, we will share how we try to crack the Google Home from both hardware and software aspects, get and analyze the newest firmware, solve the problem, and introduce new methods to discover vulnerabilities in SQLite and Curl through Fuzz and manual auditing. Through these methods, we found "Magellan", a set of three heap buffer overflow and heap data disclosure vulnerabilities in SQLite ( CVE-2018-20346, CVE-2018-20505 CVE-2018-20506 ) We also found "Dias", two remote memory leak and stack buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Curl ( CVE-2018-16890 and CVE-2019-3822 ). Considering the fact that these vulnerabilities affect many systems and software, we have issued a vulnerability alert to notify the vulnerable vendor to fix it.

We will disclose the details of "Magellan" and "Dias" for the first time and highlight some of our new vulnerability exploitation techniques. In the first part, we will introduce the results of our analysis on hardware, how to get the newest firmware from simulating an update request, and attack surface of Google Home. We will show how to use Magellan to complete the remote exploit of Google Home, we will also give a brefing talk about how to use Dias to complete the remote attack on Apache+PHP and Git. Finally, we will summarize our research and provide some security development advice to the basic software library developers.

Wenxiang Qian

Wenxiang Qian is a senior security researcher at the Tencent Blade Team. He is focusing on security research of IoT devices. He also do security audits for web browsers. He was on the top 100 of annual MSRC list (2016 & 2017 ). He published a book called "Whitehat Talk About Web Browser Security ". Twitter: @leonwxqian

YuXiang Li

YuXiang Li is a senior security researcher at Tencent Blade Team, specialized in the study of Mobile Security and IoT Security. He has reported multiple vulnerabilities of Android and received acknowledgments from vendors(Google/Huawei). He was a speaker of HITB AMS 2018 and XCON 2018. Twitter: @Xbalien29

HuiYu Wu

HuiYu Wu is a senior security researcher at Tencent Blade Team. Now his job is mainly focus on IoT security research and mobile security research. He was also a bug hunter, winner of GeekPwn 2015, and speaker of DEF CON 26 , HITB 2018 AMS and POC 2017. Twitter: @DroidSec_cn


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