This paper describes an ethical hacking assessment of a consumer home alarm ecosystem, focusing on radio-frequency attack surfaces. We show how proximity-based adversaries can undermine system assurances via waveform capture, re-injection and interference without needing privileged credentials or server compromise. In this paper, we leverage a structured penetration testing workflow paired with IoT-centric threat modeling. We also perform practical RF adversarial techniques like signal replay, selective jamming, and protocol observation. We combine it with local network reconnaissance and constrained fuzzing of undocumented endpoints to assess end-to-end resilience. The experiments reveal a serious authorization bypass through signal re-transmission and effective denial through gaps in the detection of narrowband interference. They also show brittle behavior in the opaque service bound to a high, nonstandard port. This is preferable to expose brokenness than to enable unauthorized access. Overall, the results highlight the risks of legacy RF design choices, misplaced trust in silent local services, and failure to expose sufficient telemetry to users. The studies support the use of secure-by-design RF controls – such as rolling codes or nonce-based freshness with anti-rolljam measures – authenticated signaling, minimal on-device service exposure, and interfering reporting that users can act on. The proposed paper provides a repeatable ethical methodology for evaluating RF-enabled consumer security devices and a set of prioritized mitigations in line with modern IoT security baselines.

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Ghost Signals: Ethical RF Adversarial Testing of Consumer Alarm Ecosystems

  • Usman Imtiaz

摘要

This paper describes an ethical hacking assessment of a consumer home alarm ecosystem, focusing on radio-frequency attack surfaces. We show how proximity-based adversaries can undermine system assurances via waveform capture, re-injection and interference without needing privileged credentials or server compromise. In this paper, we leverage a structured penetration testing workflow paired with IoT-centric threat modeling. We also perform practical RF adversarial techniques like signal replay, selective jamming, and protocol observation. We combine it with local network reconnaissance and constrained fuzzing of undocumented endpoints to assess end-to-end resilience. The experiments reveal a serious authorization bypass through signal re-transmission and effective denial through gaps in the detection of narrowband interference. They also show brittle behavior in the opaque service bound to a high, nonstandard port. This is preferable to expose brokenness than to enable unauthorized access. Overall, the results highlight the risks of legacy RF design choices, misplaced trust in silent local services, and failure to expose sufficient telemetry to users. The studies support the use of secure-by-design RF controls – such as rolling codes or nonce-based freshness with anti-rolljam measures – authenticated signaling, minimal on-device service exposure, and interfering reporting that users can act on. The proposed paper provides a repeatable ethical methodology for evaluating RF-enabled consumer security devices and a set of prioritized mitigations in line with modern IoT security baselines.