Fortinet Discovers Meian Safety Alarm Android Application Weak Credential Encryption Vulnerability
Summary
Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered a weak credential encryption vulnerability in Android application for Meian Safety Alarm.Meian is a manufacturer of home safety alarms. Some of their alarms are remotely controllable via SMS: you can start / stop the alarm remotely, get its current status, enable/disable some zones, etc. To be correctly processed by the alarm, the SMS to send must comply with a strict format. To assist end-users in correctly issuing this SMS, Meian has implemented an Android application where you just need to push a button like start/stop/status etc. Of course, an initial configuration step is required, to provide the phone number of the alarm and its management password.
The discovered vulnerability in the Android application is that the alarm's management password is weakly protected. It is stored on the phone in a file which is encrypted using a proprietary encryption algorithm. Moreover, a default password for this encryption algorithm is hard-coded and probably used by careless end-users.