An exploitable permanent denial of service vulnerability exists in Insteon Hub running firmware version 1013. The firmware upgrade functionality, triggered via PubNub, retrieves signed firmware binaries using plain HTTP requests. The device doesn't check the kind of firmware image that is going to be installed and thus allows for flashing any signed firmware into any MCU. Since the device contains different and incompatible MCUs, flashing one firmware to the wrong MCU will result in a permanent brick condition. To trigger this vulnerability, an attacker needs to impersonate the remote server "cache.insteon.com" and serve a signed firmware image.
Published 2018-08-02 · Modified