Smart meter SSL screw-up exposes punters' TV habits

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/09/smart_meter_privacy_oops/

By John Leyden
The Register
9th January 2012

White-hat hackers have exposed the privacy shortcomings of smart meter 
technology.

The researchers said German firm Discovergy apparently allowed 
information gathered by its smart meters to travel over an insecure link 
to its servers. The information – which could be intercepted – 
apparently could be interpreted to reveal not only whether or not users 
happened to be at home and consuming electricity at the time but even 
what film they were watching, based on the fingerprint of power usage. 
The many surprising secrets revealed by some smart meter set-ups were 
revealed during a presentation by researchers Dario Carluccio and 
Stephan Brinkhaus at the 28th Chaos Computing Congress (28c3) hacker 
conference in Berlin late last month.

During the talk, entitled, Smart Hacking for Privacy (YouTube video 
here), the researchers explained that they came across numerous security 
and privacy-related issues after signing up with the smart electricity 
meter service supplied by Discovergy.

Because Discovergy's website's SSL certificate was misconfigured, the 
meters failed to send data over a secure, encrypted link - contrary to 
claims Discovergy made at the time before the presentation. This meant 
that confidential electricity consumption data was sent in clear text. 
Because meter readings were sent in clear text, the researchers were 
able to intercept and send back forged (incorrect) meter readings back 
to Discovergy.

[...]

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