Here’s How Hackers Could Have Spied On Your DJI Drone Account

Nov 8, 2018

Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point today revealed
details of a potential dangerous vulnerability in DJI Drone web app
that could have allowed attackers access user accounts and synced
sensitive information within it, including flight records,
location, live video camera feed, and photos taken during a flight.

Thought the vulnerability was discovered and responsibly
reported by the security firm Check Point to the DJI security team
in March this year, the popular China-based drone manufacturing
company fixed the issue after almost six months in September.

The account takeover attack takes advantage of a total of three
vulnerabilities in the DJI infrastructure, including a Secure
Cookie bug in the DJI identification process, a cross-site
scripting (XSS) flaw in its Forum and a SSL Pinning issue in its
mobile app.

The first vulnerability, i.e. not having the “secure” and
“httponly” cookie flag enabled, allowed attackers to steal login
cookies of a user by injecting a malicious JavaScript into the DJI
Forum website using the XSS vulnerability.

“To trigger this XSS attack all the attacker need do is to write a
simple post in the DJI forum which would contain the link to the
payload,” the researchers explained in a report published
today.

“A user who logged into DJI Forum, then clicked a
specially-planted malicious link, could have had his or her login
credentials stolen to allow access to other DJI online assets,”

^[1]

Once captured, the login cookies, which include authentication
tokens, can then be re-used to take complete control over the
user’s DJI Web Account, the DJI GO/4/pilot Mobile Applications and
account on its centralized drone operations management platform
called DJI Flighthub.
However, to access the compromised account on the DJI mobile apps,
attackers have to first intercept the Mobile application traffic
after bypassing its implementation of SSL pinning by performing
man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack to the DJI server using Burp Suite.

“We also carried out further research and found that by parsing
flight logs files we can get much more information such as location
and angle of every picture taken during the drone’s flight, the
drone’s home location, last known location and more,” researchers
said.

DJI classified the vulnerability as “high risk—low probability,”
because successful exploitation of the flaw required a user “to be
logged into their DJI account while clicking on a specially-planted
malicious link in the DJI Forum.”

DJI also said the company did not find any evidence of the flaw
being exploited in the wild.

Check Point researchers reported the vulnerability to the DJI
through its bug bounty program, but declined to reveal the
financial reward offered to them. The DJI bug bounty program offers
up to $30,000 in rewards for single vulnerabilities.

DJI has been facing scrutiny in the United States after the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a memo late last
year accusing the
company ^[2] of sending
sensitive information about the U.S. infrastructure to China
through its commercial drones and software.

However, the drone maker denied the allegations, saying
that the memo from the US government office was based on “clearly
false and misleading claims.”

References

^{^}
report
(research.checkpoint.com)
^{^}
accusing the company
(thehackernews.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Here’s How Hackers Could Have Spied On Your DJI Drone Account

References

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