The Amazon Alexa Voice Assistant can only be used to convey user knowledge due to security vulnerabilities in service subdomains.
The smart assistant, which is discovered on devices such as Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, with more than two hundred million international submissions, vulnerable to attackers seeking non-public identification data (PII) and voice recordings.
Check Point Research said Thursday that security issues were due to Amazon Alexa subdomains that may suffer poor configuration of cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
When Check Point started reviewing the Alexa mobile app, the company detected the lifestyle of an SSL mechanism that prevents traffic inspection. However, the script used can bypass the Frida SSL Universal Depression script.
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This led to the discovery of the CORS policy application configuration, which allowed Ajax requests to be sent from Amazon subdomains.
If a subdomain is considered vulnerable to code injection, an XSS attack can be launched and this is done through track.amazon.com and skillsstore.amazon.com.
According to Check Point, a victim would need to click on a malicious link to exploit the vulnerabilities. A victim who is sent to a phishing domain, for example, may be subject to a code injection and theft of their Amazon-related cookies.
An attacker would then use those cookies to send an Ajax question to the Amazon Skill Store, whose question would return a list of all skills installed in the victim’s Amazon Alexa account.
By launching an XSS attack, researchers were also able to obtain CSRF tokens and, as a result, make moves by posing as the victim. This can come simply with removing or installing Alexa skills, and the CSRF token to remove a skill, and then installing a new one with the same phrase of evocation, you can simply “activate an attack ability,” the team explains.
If a victim inadvertently activates this new capability, attackers can record voice history as well as abuse interactions of the ability to collect non-public information.
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During testing, Check Point found that, in theory, phone numbers, non-public addresses, usernames, and bank history may be stolen.
“Amazon does not record your bank login credentials, however, your interactions are logged and, since we have the chat history, we can interact the victim with the competition of the bank and get their knowledge history,” the team explains. “We can also get usernames and phone numbers, depending on the capabilities installed in the user’s Alexa account.”
However, Alexa, in particular, deletes bank details in old newspapers.
Check Point is also a proof-of-concept (PoC) code.
Skill abuse is an attractive form of attack and a forward-looking way for cyber attackers to enter our homes: the time window before malicious skills are detected and removed is possibly brief.
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“It’s vital to note that Amazon conducts security reviews as a component of competency certification and frequently monitors live capabilities to detect potentially malicious behaviors,” the researchers said. “All known offensive skills are blocked during certification or temporarily disabled.”
Check Point researchers privately revealed their findings to Amazon in June, and security issues have now been fixed.
“We conducted these studies to highlight how critical it is to ensure those devices to maintain user privacy,” said Oded Vanunu, director of product vulnerability research at Check Point. “Fortunately, Amazon temporarily reacted to our disclosure to close those vulnerabilities in some Amazon/Alexa subdomains. We expect device brands to follow Amazon’s example and review their products for vulnerabilities that may compromise user privacy.”
“Protecting our devices is a very sensible priority and we appreciate paintings from independent researchers like Check Point that bring us potential problems,” an Amazon spokesperson told ZDNet. “We resolved this factor in a while after we were caught in our attention, and continued with our systems. We are not aware of any time of use of this vulnerability as opposed to our consumers or disclosure of visitor information.”
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