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In a presentation at this year's DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas on Friday, Damien Cauquil, senior security researcher at Econocom Digital Security, showed how the pocket-sized microcomputer could be configured to sniff out keystrokes from a wireless keyboard, and even take control of a quadcopter drone with just some nifty programming.
The Micro:bit, which costs just £12 in the UK or $15 in the US, is powered by a 16MHz 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 CPU with 16KB of RAM and Bluetooth connectivity that, with a little Python coding, turns out to be an excellent wireless sniffer. To make matters better for hackers, it's also tiny, and thus easy to hide while doing this job.
Cauquil showed that by using publicly available software, he could program the Micro:bit to snoop on signals from a wireless keyboard using Bluetooth, and then hide it in a desk to grab sensitive info, passwords and other login details out of the air as they are typed. Admittedly, the amount of storage on the Micro:bit is pitifully small, but it's enough to hold the goodies you'd need for further mischief.
But there was also another use for the device. Cauquil attached it to a drone controller handset and used the resulting gizmo to interfere with an airborne quadcopter's control mechanisms and hijack its flight controls. In other words, you can wire a suitably programmed Micro:bit into a controller and potentially use it to take over someone else's drone.
(Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Monday July 31 2017, @03:26AM (5 children)
I know the Micro:Bit is supposed to be the new hotness, so all new hacking projects are supposed to try to incorporate it. Because for anarchists and non-conformists they seem to be herd animals.
But the Pi 0 W is cheaper and more capable. WiFi+BT > BT, 512MB > 16KB for System RAM, lots more GPIO on the Pi without the crazy ass connector the Micro:Bit thought was some kind of fashion statement, etc. Best of all the Pi 0 W is $10 vs $15 for the Micro:Bit. Yea it is overkill to boot a full Linux distro to sniff BT but since you have it you can send out the results over the WiFi and hide the whole thing better. The only wins for the Micro:Bit is leds, buttons, accelerometer, compass and slightly easier to power from a battery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @05:20AM
Yes the trendy herd animals are hypocrites. They disrupt nothing and blindly follow trends of technologies which have become economically feasible during their formative years. They are not anarchists and and they are not non-conformists. The one attribute they all have in common is youth.
(Score: 2) by Some call me Tim on Monday July 31 2017, @05:52AM (1 child)
I should know better, but the vast majority of this post is *WHOOSH*! Any chance you can you can downgrade this to slightly less than rocket surgeon levels of wharblgarble for those of us who are not rocket surgeons? Thanks!
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday July 31 2017, @08:36AM
Go to some place line sparkfun.com that carries both the Pi Zero W [sparkfun.com] and the Micro:Bit [sparkfun.com] and examine the price and specs of both. It ain't even close. But somehow a vast hype machine has appeared around the Micro:Bit. Of course the Pi never lived up to the hype around it either, but at least it found a niche to succeed in even if it never has and probably never will be used in any quantity to teach kids how to program as originally envisioned.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday July 31 2017, @04:21PM (1 child)
And a fanatical devotion to the Pope?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Wednesday August 02 2017, @04:29PM