Pierluigi Paganini November 08, 2019

Pwn2Own Tokyo 2019 -Day2: Experts earned a total of $120,000 for finding exploits against Samsung Galaxy S10 and Xiaomi Mi9 phones and TP-Link AC1750 routers.

On the second day of the Pwn2Own Tokyo 2019 hacking contest, white hat hackers received a total of $120,000 for finding exploits against Samsung Galaxy S10 and Xiaomi Mi9 phones and TP-Link AC1750 routers.

Four out of seven hacking attempts scheduled for day two were a success. The security duo Amat Cama and Richard Zhu of the Fluoroacetate team earned $50,000 for pushing an arbitrary file onto a Samsung Galaxy S10. The experts tricked the device into connecting to their rogue base station that triggered a stack overflow.

“Instead, they moved straight to the Samsung Galaxy S10 in the same category. Their rogue base station used a stack overflow to push their file onto the target handset.” reads the post published by the ZDI. “The successful demonstration earned them $50,000 and 5 Master of Pwn points. This is the third year in a row the Samsung handset has been compromised via baseband.”

Richard and Amat also attempted to hack a NETGEAR Nighthawk Smart WiFi Router (R6700) viaLAN interface, the attack succeeded, but the auth bypass they used was previously exploited by another contestant. For this reason, the attempt was considered only a partial success.

At the end of the day, the same team attempted for the second time to hack the Galaxy S10, this time via its web browser. The experts used an integer overflow along with a UAF for the sandbox escape to exfiltrate a picture off the phone. The exploit worked by the issue they exploited in the attack chain had been used by a previous contestant.

Zhu and Cama have earned a total of $195,000 over the two days of Pwn2Own Tokyo 2019 winning the contest for the third year in a row.

The experts Pedro Ribeiro and Radek form Team Flashback received $20,000 for hacking a TP-Link AC1750 router through its WAN port.

“The exploit used a stack overflow combined with a logic bug to gain code execution on the device. This earned them $20,000 and one more point towards Master of Pwn.” continues the post. “They wrap up their first Pwn2Own with a total of $50,000 for four successful demonstrations. We certainly hope this is just the beginning of a long and prosperous Pwn2Own career.”

The F-Secure team earned $20,000 for achieving arbitrary code execution on a TP-Link AC1750 router. The team also received $30,000 for an exploit targeting the Xiaomi Mi9 phone via the NFC component. The experts exploited a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the device’s NFC component to exfiltrate data by touching a specially crafted NFC tag.

Over two days, Pwn2Own participants received $315,000 for disclosing 18 different vulnerabilities. The flaws have been reported to the impacted vendors, the ZDI organization will give them 90 days to address the issues before disclosing them.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Pwn2Own Tokyo 2019, hacking)

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