What the Watchers See

Architecture and Background

What the Watchers See: Eavesdropping on Municipal Mesh Cameras for Giggles (or Pure Evil) Dustin Hoffman SENIOR ENGINEER, EXIGENT SYSTEMS INC. Thomas (TK) Kinsey SENIOR ENGINEER, EXIGENT SYSTEMS INC. Municipalities across the nation are deploying IP-based 802.11 wireless mesh networks for city-wide services, including cameras and microphones for police monitoring, and remote audio broadcasting.

Vulnerability Analysis

Once deployed, the standards-based nature of these networks make it easy for cash-strapped cities to use them for all manner of other IP-based services too. In this presentation we examine a deployed and operational municipal mesh network designed by LeverageIS using Firetide hardware and Firetide's proprietary Firetide Mesh (formerly "Automesh") wireless mesh protocol. In the process, we decode the previously undocumented mesh protocol enough to (1) "tune in" to live feeds from the various cameras positioned across the city, just like we were in police headquarters, and (2) inject arbitrary video into these streams.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

There's a demo site for you to see the municipal camera streams for yourself, and our code is included. We'll cover wireless mesh networks and other basic theory, so no prior technical knowledge is required. Dustin Hoffman is the president and senior engineer of Exigent Systems Inc., an IT services firm.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

He’s interesting in how all kinds of complex systems work and interact, whether technical, organizational, legal, or economic. It often involves otherwise public data used in non-obvious ways. Thomas (TK) Kinsey is a senior engineer at Exigent Systems Inc. You'll find him breaking things and (usually) putting them back together. High School "IT Guy" - PC Retail slave - noob sysadmin - not so noob net/sysadmin - Now. Networks/VoIP are his current focus, some sort of BSD is usually involved.