DEFCON preview: Netgear RP614 CSRF attack video

To give you a sense of what Mike Bailey and I will be covering at defcon 17 this Saturday at 11am, I thought I'd give you a little taste courtesy of a Netgear RP614v4 router that suffers from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities, as well as persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) issues.
See OSVDB advisory 54885 for further specifics. BTW, please support OSVDB!

The short version:
The Netgear RP614v4 web-based administration interface allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing any validity checks to verify the requests. This can be exploited to perform administrative actions or conduct script insertion attacks e.g. when a logged-in administrator visits a malicious web site.
The sad truth of the matter is this, while I don't have access to the whole Netgear product line, the reuse the same firmware codebase across multiple devices.
Thus, in all likelihood, there are numerous Netgear devices vulnerable to this issue, if not all.
The same holds true with Linksys devices, which we'll cover in detail at DEFCON.

As you will see, the approach is simple, and too often effective.
1) Miscreant crafts email utilizing well proven social engineering methodology.
2) Victim follows orders and, while authenticated to vulnerable device, clicks on that damned link.
3) Vulnerable device does not perform any validity checks to verify the requests made via the attacker's web page lurking behind the link in the email.
4) Vulnerable device fails in whatever fashion it's told to.

As exhibited in the video I've created for your viewing pleasure, I force the admin session to enable remote management (disabled by default) and change the remote management access port to 6667 for old time's sake. If, as it so often is, the admin account is left to default password, game over. Or, in many cases, you can also force a password change via CSRF as well.
Any function the firmware provides can be forced via a victim admin's session; that which is exhibited here is but a single examplar.
Tokens, people...tokens!

The video, as promised:
Lo-fi (5.63 MB MP4)
Med-fi (53.9 MB WMV)
Hi-fi (73.4 MB AVI)

Hope to see you at DEFCON; please say hi if you're there on Saturday.
I'll be easily spotted in jeans and my white Certified Application Security Specialist (ASS) golf shirt.

Cheers.

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