Robot 'guard dog' protects Wi-Fi setups

05/08/2003 Written by Declan McCullagh (.)

LAS VEGAS – A strange two-​wheeled crea­ture was skim­ming through the halls of the Alexis Park Hotel on Sun­day: a robot cre­ated to sniff out net­work vulnerabilities.

Cre­ated by two mem­bers of a loose asso­ci­a­tion of secu­rity experts called the Shmoo Group, the robot is designed to wheel around on its own detect­ing and report­ing secu­rity prob­lems with Wi-​Fi wire­less networks.

“The point of the hacker robot is that it can become an autonomous hacker droid,” said Paul Hol­man, the robot’s co-​designer, who demon­strated it for the first time at the Def­Con hacker con­ven­tion here. “It can get in close to the net­work. On the offen­sive side, it can be used for cor­po­rate or polit­i­cal espi­onage. On the defen­sive side, it can be used for network-​vulnerability assess­ment.”

The pro­to­type robot, which has not been named, may be the first crea­ture designed for this pur­pose. Hol­man and hard­ware engi­neer Eric Johan­son hope to sell cus­tom ver­sions of the unit to gov­ern­ment agen­cies and busi­nesses that are wor­ried about the secu­rity of their own wire­less net­works or that hope to break into some­one else’s. Hol­man and Johan­son have not set a price.

Wi-​Fi setups are explod­ing in pop­u­lar­ity in cor­po­rate Amer­ica, but accord­ing to Johan­son, they fre­quently intro­duce secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties into a company’s larger net­work.

“The biggest hole right now is wire­less net­works,” Johan­son said. “You don’t know what the cov­er­age of your wire­less net­work is. It’s vari­able depend­ing on the anten­nas being used by the guys on the out­side. Everyone’s deploy­ing wire­less net­works. And it’s very dif­fi­cult to make them secure.”

In its pro­to­type ver­sion, the robot weighs about 40 pounds, can reach a speed equal to that of a fast walk and can roll around for three hours at a stretch before using up its power sup­ply. It uses one 802.11b card to eaves­drop on a wire­less net­work and a sec­ond card as a con­trol chan­nel to com­mu­ni­cate with its owner. Two bat­ter­ies – a sealed lead acid pack for the elec­tron­ics and a nickel metal hydride pack to drive the wheels – pro­vide power.

Cur­rently, Hol­man said, the robot can sniff out pass­words sent through pro­to­cols such as Tel­net and POP, the post office pro­to­col used for e-​mail. Its design­ers said they’re still work­ing on the autonomous capa­bil­i­ties – includ­ing sen­sors to detect humans and obsta­cles – and so they used a game con­troller attached to a lap­top in a back­pack to maneu­ver the robot around Def­Con.

Johan­son sug­gested his robot could be a cheap net­work guard dog. “If they can just plug this thing in and have it roam around their wire­less net­work, it’s a more cost-​effective way than hav­ing a human do it.”