RSA IoT Village 2018: Hacking some of the things – IoT Agenda
It is the Internet of Things, but with an enterprise angle. Take that to mean industry vertical applications, development ecosystems, product design, hardware, deployment and more.
RSA attendees who wanted a hands-on taste of hardware hacking were able to get their fix at the IoT Village area of the RSA Sandbox, a busy ancillary location of the RSA Conference 2018 in San Francisco. There, they learned that the UART interfaces ubiquitously found in IoT equipment have some default behaviors that enable at least preliminary access to the workings of the device, giving hackers a starting point for developing more thoroughgoing security breaks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) world may be exciting, but there are serious technical challenges that need to be addressed, especially by developers. In this handbook, learn how to meet the security, analytics, and testing requirements for IoT applications.
I took some time to work through a couple of the hands-on exercises at the workbenches comprising the village. I was drawn, in part, because there was a soldering iron on the table. It turned out we didn’t need a soldering iron, but all the same I was handed the guts of a Philips Hue controller hub and a logic scanner with a bunch of lead probes hanging off of it, a sort of miniature version of the wiring harness used to administer an EKG.