Smart TVs can be easily hacked
June 22, 2012 by Network Security
Filed under Network security
The new home entertainment experience has gone beyond our imagination regarding traditional television. The brand new TV sets are now much more like a computer, with memory, a processor, a hard drive and even some operating system of their own.
A lot of these TV sets are running a lite version of either Linux, Unix or Windows as the operating system will allow them to acces a network or other sorts of image/audio/video decoding services. The more expensive brands also have full browsers installed on their tv sets.
The TV’s can now be all the time online, offering services like online shopping, music downloads, video sharing and many other web related services. Of course, in order for all the above services to work they need to use sommunication protocols that have to be tested and secured.
Codenomicon tested six of the top TV brands with their smart tv models in order to see how the security issue is approached. Unfortunately the news are not so good as none of the models passed all the tests.
“It was disappointing to discover that so many of name-brand TVs crashed with video and DVB protocols, when those are the core functionalities in the TVs. The potential for vulnerabilities in these devices is relatively high, and the threat scenarios increase as the smart TVs become more and more popular in regular households”, declared security specialist Rikke Kuipers
Codenomicon will not release any details regarding the vulnerabilities in order to protect the owners of the devices.
The whole results of the tests are available here
