Adtran ISP Hacking

Adtran 411 Security Audit Adtran produces equipment for fiber ISPs. I was provided an Adtran 411 by my current ISP for Internet access and decided to take a deep look into it. Hardware The Adtran 411 is a small GPON fiber ONT (Optical Network Terminal) designed to give symmetrical gigabit fiber Internet to SOHO users. It connects to the ISP via a GPON uplink and provides the user a normal ethernet RJ-45 connector to plug their router into and a RJ-11 port for a landline to be tunneled over VOIP. ...

August 15, 2025 · 8 min

Sena WiFi Adapter Security Assessment & Vulnerabilities

This post outlines a security assessment of the new Sena Wifi Adapter I performed last summer for fun. With the world on lock-down due to COVID-19, I spent a lot of time last summer escaping the city going on motorcycle rides through the mountains and forests surrounding the bay area. It’s the perfect social distance activity because if you get within 6ft of someone you are likely to crash. One of my favorite motorcycle accessories is my Sena headset. It allows me to listen to navigation or music from my phone over Bluetooth while riding, and talk to other riders in my group. ...

March 9, 2021 · 18 min

BygoneSSL - dealing with residual certificates for pre-owned domains

This is the blog version of my DEFCON 26 talk Lost and Found Certificates: dealing with residual certificates for pre-owned domains, which I co-presented with Dylan Ayrey. You can learn more about BygoneSSL and see a demo at insecure.design. The Problem A Certificate can outlive the ownership of a domain. If the domain is then re-registered by someone else, this leaves with the first owner with a valid SSL certificate for the domain now owned by someone else. ...

August 13, 2018 · 8 min

Tethr: Android Tethering Provisioning Check Bypass (CVE-2017-0554)

On most unrooted, stock, Android phones, enabling tethering will run a “Provisioning Check” with your wireless provider to ensure that your data plan allows tethering. This post documents Tethr, a way to bypass the provisioning check on Android devices prior to version 7.1.2. After discovering this method I reported it to the Android bug bounty fixing the issue and receiving CVE-2017-0554. Background The ability to tether is controlled by your device’s build.prop file, usually located at /system/build.prop. The default is to require the provisioning check before enabling tethering, but it can by bypassed by adding the following line: ...

December 27, 2017 · 4 min

Ambergris

For those of you not in the know, ambergris is defined as: a wax-like substance that originates as a secretion in the intestines of the sperm whale, found floating in tropical seas and used in perfume manufacture. However, that will not be what this post is about (sorry to disappoint). Instead, I’ll present what happens when building an image on Docker that contains a reverse shell in the Dockerfile. ...

January 19, 2017 · 7 min

TRIPLEX DVRLink DVR468RW Exploit

At an internship I had a while ago one project assigned to me was to regain access to a CCTV security system which we had been locked out of for some years. (The previous manager left without leaving the password.) The DVR system was a TRIPLEX DVRLink DVR468RW, whatever that is. It seemed cheap; a small embedded computer with video in/out, a hard-drive and CD-RW drive for recording storage. The administration interface was accessed either by a web server running on the device or a desktop client you installed on your computer. ...

June 20, 2013 · 3 min

SMS DOS: Cellphone Denial Of Service via text messages

A while ago I wondered how well modern cellphones could handle a flood of text messages. So I created a simple python program to test just that. The program works by sending emails to a SMS Gateway which will forward the message to the phone in the form of a text message. I tested my program on two devices, my modern HTC Incredible running Android and my aging LG Chocolate dumb-phone. The results where surprising! After starting the program my HTC Incredible froze after receiving the first 20 messages. A battery pull was required to get it to respond. The second it finished booting it froze again! I was only able to make it respond by stopping my program and rebooting the phone. After it boot it froze again while catching up on all the messages that where sent. ...

March 11, 2012 · 2 min