Software Engineering Institute

Overview

Various Silicon Labs Z-Wave chipsets do not support encryption, can be downgraded to not use weaker encryption, and are vulnerable to denial of service. Some of these vulnerabilities are inherent in Z-Wave protocol specifications.

Description

Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs chipsets have multiple vulnerabilities. For further details, including specific devices tested, see Riding the IoT Wave With VFuzz: Discovering Security Flaws in Smart Homes.

CVE-2020-9057
Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 100, 200, and 300 series chipsets do not support encryption.

CVE-2020-9058
Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 500 series chipsets using CRC-16 encapsulation do not implement encryption or replay protection.

CVE-2020-9059
Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 500 series chipsets using S0 authentication are susceptible to uncontrolled resource consumption which can lead to battery exhaustion.

CVE-2020-9060
Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 500 series chipsets using S2 are susceptible to denial of service and resource exhaustion via malformed SECURITY NONCE GET, SECURITY NONCE GET 2, NO OPERATION, or NIF REQUEST messages.

CVE-2020-9061
Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 500 and 700 series chipsets are susceptible to denial of service via malformed routing messages.

CVE-2020-10137
Z-Wave devices based on Silicon Labs 700 series chipsets using S2 do not adequately authenticate or encrypt FIND_NODE_IN_RANGE frames.

Impact

Depending on the chipset and device, an attacker within Z-Wave radio range can deny service, cause devices to crash, deplete batteries, intercept, observe, and replay traffic, and control vulnerable devices.

Solution

Mitigations for these vulnerabilities vary based on the chipset and device. In some cases it may be necessary to upgrade to newer hardware, for example, 500 and 700 series chipsets that support S2 authentication and encryption.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Carlos Kayembe Nkuba, Seulbae Kim, Sven Dietrich, and Heejo Lee for researching and reporting these vulnerabilities.

This document was written by Timur Snoke and Art Manion.

Vendor Information

References

• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9663293
• https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3138768
• https://github.com/CNK2100/VFuzz-public
• https://products.z-wavealliance.org/products/2559
• https://z-wavealliance.org/z-wave-oems-developers/