Girl… Fault Interrupted

DerbyCon 4.0 - Family Rootz

Presented by: Maggie Jauregui
Date: Saturday September 27, 2014
Time: 18:00 - 18:50
Location: Track 4

GFCI’s (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupts) are a practically unnoticeable part of our daily lives- except maybe for when you have to fumble around with the Reset button on your hair dryer to get it to work of course. I re-discovered a way to melt and spark (sometimes explode) components that make up the GFCI mechanism for several off-the-shelf electro domestics wirelessly using specific RF frequencies. Magic smoke/spark demo included! Similarly- I’m able to trip other GFCI’s (the type built-in to several apartment/home walls) creating a DoS on running electro domestics. Electro domestics are probably not be the worst this vulnerability could potentially achieve- since GFCI’s and solenoids are used on many different types of electronics and they are required by code on many household locations.I also use a directional antenna to remote disable and/or trip GFCI’s from a few yards away. I list all vulnerable patents I ran across and all affected switch types (such as AFCI’s).

Maggie Jauregui


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