Hello, welcome to the Monday, August 15th, 2020 edition of the Sands and at Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich.

And today I'm, well, yet again, recording from the home office here in Jacksonville, Florida.

Friday, I mentioned to pay attention to a talk at DefCon regarding a vulnerability in the

Real Tech Ecos Software Development Kit or SDK. The talk by researchers from Faraday security

did not disappoint, so let me take most of today's podcast explaining what is happening here and what you need to know.

Realtech is predominantly known for a variety of different chips that they produce.

For example, you may have heard the name for audio cards or network interfaces.

In this case, the chip at the center of all of this is the RTL 819 series

of system on a chip components. There are many different variations of this chip, but they're

implementing essentially a complete router with memory, with Wi-Fi, with wired Ethernet connectivity, all in one convenient

package. That's the reason of the big selling point here. And if you ever wondered why so many

home routers and such that you see out there, they all offer very similar feature sets and

specs, well, they all share based the same system on a chip,

and these Real Tech chips are one of the major suppliers

for these type of routers.

So Real Tech produces this system on a chip,

but of course by itself, it's not very useful.

You also need software to actually control

it and to help with that Real Tech produces a software development kit that implements many

of the basic sort of routing networking features that you know on these kind of devices.

Of particular interest in this case is an application layer gateway for the

voice over IP protocol SIP. Routers often do NAD when they translate internal non-routable IP

...