Researchers uncover security holes in China-based Huawei routers

Huawei is one of the fastest-growing network and telecommunications equipment makers in the world. The vulnerabilities were discovered and presented by Felix Lindner and Gregor Kopf of the security firm Recurity Labs. They talks about three vulnerabilities demonstrated at the Defcon conference, which included a session hijack, a heap overflow, and a stack overflow, and the discussion of more than 10,000 calls in the firmware code that went to sprintf, an insecure function.

The problem is due to the use of "1990s-style code" in the firmware of some Huawei VRP routers, he said. (The models are the Huawei AR18 and AR 29 series). With a known exploit, an attacker could get access to the systems, log in as administrator, change the admin passwords and reconfigure the systems, which would allow for interception of all the traffic running through the routers.

Both Lindner and Kopf have criticized Huawei for not having a security contact, as well as for its lack of security advisories for its products. Additionally, the researchers say firmware updates don't talk about bugs that may have been fixed.