Researchers at healthcare cybersecurity company Cynerio just published a report about five cybersecurity holes they found in a hospital robot system called TUG.
TUGs are pretty much robot cabinets or platforms on wheels, apparently capable of carrying up to 600kg and rolling along at just under 3km/hr (a slow walk).
They’re apparently available in both hospital variants (e.g. for transporting medicines in locked drawers on ward rounds) and hospitality variants (e.g. conveying crockery and crumpets to the conservatory).
During what we’re assuming was a combined penetration test/security assessment job, the Cynerio researchers were able to sniff out traffic to and from the robots in use, track the network exchanges back to a web portal running on the hospital network, and from there to uncover five non-trivial security flaws in the backend web servers used to control the hospital’s robot underlords.
In a media-savvy and how-we-wish-people-wouldn’t-do-this-but-they-do PR gesture, the researchers dubbed their bugs The JekyllBot Five, dramatically stylised JekyllBot:5 for short.
Despite the unhinged, psychokiller overtones of the name “Jekyllbot”, however, the bugs don’t have anything to do with AI gone amuck or a robot revolution.
The researchers also duly noted in their report that, at the hospital where they were investigating with permission, the robot control portal was not directly visible from the internet, so a would-be attacker would have already needed an internal foothold to abuse any of the bugs they found.
Unauthenticated access to everything
Nevertheless, the fact that the hospital’s own network was shielded from the internet was just as well.
With TCP access to the server running the web portal, the researchers claim that they could:
- Access and alter the system’s user database. They were apparently able to modify the rights given to existing users, to add new users, and even to assign users administrative privileges.
- Snoop on trivially-hashed user passwords. With a username to add to a web request, they could recover a straight, one-loop, unsalted MD5 hash of that users’ password. In other words, with a precomputed list of common password hashes, or an MD5 rainbow table, many existing passwords could easily be cracked.
- Send robot control commands. According to the researchers, TCP-level access to the robot control server was enough to issue unauthenticated commands to currently active robots. These commands included opening drawers in the robot’s cabinet (e.g. where medications are supposedly secured), cancelling existing commands, recovering the robot’s location and altering its speed.
- Take photos with a robot. The researchers showed sample images snapped and recovered (with authorisation) from active robots, including pictures of a corridor, the inside of an elevator (lift), and a shot from a robot approaching its charging station.
- Inject malicious JavaScript into legitimate users’ browsers. The researchers found that the robot management console portal was vulnerable to various types of cross-site scripting (XSS) attack, which could allow malware to be foisted on legitimate users of the system.
XSS revisited
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