One of the greatest misconceptions about online safety is that home networks are somehow private. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been true since around the turn of the century when we started filling our home networks with Internet-connected boxes serving local web pages. The problem is that web browsers typically make little distinction between web sites on the public internet versus those on a home or office network. This ultimately opens paths from untrusted external web content to sensitive IoT devices on a local LAN. This is compounded by the fact that many of the embedded devices sold for home or office are designed to trust all connections coming from a home network. Many smart home products, media streaming devices and even cameras completely lack authentication checks or have trivial authentication bypass vulnerabilities.

This is where Dolos comes into the picture. Dolos is an extensive framework for testing the impact of cross-site attacks against IoT devices. Dolos integrates my research into ‘Smart Cross-Site Request Forgery’ with a DNS rebinding toolkit. Some of the impacts I’ve shown with Dolos are downright spooky, too. Whether it is coercing a smart speaker to give up your location, stealing photos off your phone, hijacking a blender or Rick-Rolling an emergency nuclear strike warning, DNS rebinding is a frightening attack vector which will haunt us for years to come.