Seamlessly Discovering Netgear Universal Plug-and-Pwn (UPnP) 0-days
Introduction A Vulnerability Researcher’s Favorite Stress Relief Continuing in our series of research findings involving Netgear 1 products, 2 this blog post describes a pre-authentication vulnerability in Netgear SOHO Devices that can lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE) as root. While our previous research investigated the Netgear web server and update daemons, the issues described in this blog revolve around the device’s UPnP daemon. Anyone with Small Offices/Home Offices (SOHO) device vulnerability research experience will be familiar with UPnP. UPnP servers allow any unauthenticated device on the network to connect to the server and reconfigure the network to support its operations. For instance, the Xbox One uses UPnP to configure port forwarding necessary for gameplay. However, this service provides a large attack surface for the device, as it must allow unauthenticated requests and parse complex input to handle those requests. Further, the UPnP service on SOHO devices has pr