The Incredibly Insecure Weather Station – Part 2

Edit: The weather station issues were given CVE-2022-35122.

I contacted the manufacturer in regards to these issues. They responded quickly. I wasn’t expecting anything to be done about the issues that I brought up, but they did do something…

I logged into my weather station yesterday, an lo and behold, there is an update. Most notably the following, “added password encryption for HTTP transmission.”

Screenshot from the app itself showing the update notes.

Encryption for the password during HTTP transmission? What does this even mean? HTTPS? Why wouldn’t they just say HTTPS? Just encrypting the password client side and sending it to the station for decryption? That seems odd. I was hoping for HTTPS, but I would soon be let down.

curl request from before and after the ‘upgrade’

Before updating, I decided to try and make the curl request as I had done before to the get_device_info endpoint. As before, the password to the system was returned.

Next, I upgraded the device and then made the same request. Would you look at that, the APpwd now does look ‘encrypted.’ But, as you may have guessed, it is actually just base 64 encoded.

V2VhdGhlcjI0Njg5 –> Weather24689

bae64 decoding

Or, using jq, you can do this all on the CLI.

I think this is a losing battle.