DD-WRT, I Know Where You Live – /dev/ttyS0

I’ve always envied CSI’s amazing IP address geolocation capabilities. Not only can they get your exact physical address based solely off your IP (right down to your hotel room number!), it even works on IP addresses that don’t exist!

While that level of IP address tracking is beyond the grasp of us mere mortals, MAC address geolocation provided by Google Location Services and Skyhook is pretty close. Just feed them the MAC address of your wireless router and they will tell you, with scary precision, where you are.

But what if you wanted to find the wireless MAC address of someone else’s router – remotely? Thanks to an information disclosure vulnerability in DD-WRT, you can.

If you are running DD-WRT and have set the ‘info page’ configuration to either ‘enabled’ (the default) or ‘disabled’, an unauthenticated remote attacker can get your:

  • Router’s LAN/WAN/WLAN MAC addresses
  • Router’s internal IP address
  • Internal client’s IP addresses and host names

All they have to do is make a GET request for the ‘/Info.live.htm’ page.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Surely this only affects DD-WRT routers that have remote administration enabled!” No, it doesn’t. And don’t call me Shirley.

This is exploitable even with remote administration disabled because DD-WRT is also vulnerable to a public IP DNS rebinding attack. That means that when a user inside your network browses to any Web site, that site can proxy requests through the user’s browser and pull this information from the router’s internal Web interface – no authentication or remote administration required. And, thanks to Rebind, pulling off this type of rebinding attack is pretty simple.

You can read a more detailed write-up on the vulnerability here, or watch the below video demonstrating the use of Rebind and Google Location Services to obtain the location of a DD-WRT router.

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