A cleartext transmission of sensitive information vulnerability is present in Hickory Smart Ethernet Bridge from Belwith Products, LLC. Captured data reveals that the Hickory Smart Ethernet Bridge device communicates over the network to an MQTT broker without using encryption. This exposed the default username and password used to authenticate to the MQTT broker. This issue affects Hickory Smart Ethernet Bridge, model number H077646. The firmware does not appear to contain versioning information.
The product transmits sensitive or security-critical data in cleartext in a communication channel that can be sniffed by unauthorized actors.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hickory_smart_ethernet_bridge_firmware | Belwith-keeler | - (including) | - (including) |
Many communication channels can be “sniffed” (monitored) by adversaries during data transmission. For example, in networking, packets can traverse many intermediary nodes from the source to the destination, whether across the internet, an internal network, the cloud, etc. Some actors might have privileged access to a network interface or any link along the channel, such as a router, but they might not be authorized to collect the underlying data. As a result, network traffic could be sniffed by adversaries, spilling security-critical data. Applicable communication channels are not limited to software products. Applicable channels include hardware-specific technologies such as internal hardware networks and external debug channels, supporting remote JTAG debugging. When mitigations are not applied to combat adversaries within the product’s threat model, this weakness significantly lowers the difficulty of exploitation by such adversaries. When full communications are recorded or logged, such as with a packet dump, an adversary could attempt to obtain the dump long after the transmission has occurred and try to “sniff” the cleartext from the recorded communications in the dump itself.