Software Samaritan revamps borked Indian certs to block smart TV ads
Luckily for those with some know-how and a hatred of smart TV ads, Czech software developer Daniel Vrátil has done the work for you and published his project on GitHub for anyone who wants to take a stab at it - and do the legwork to add support for their own ad-riddled television.
Key points
- Vrátil said he’d been blocking ads on his Samsung smart TV using a Pi-hole (DNS-based ad-blocking software that can run on a Raspberry Pi, for those unfamiliar), but right around the time the eMudhra certificate leak mess unfolded, he had messed something up while tinkering with his home lab and the ads were back.
- eMudhra's private key exposure has been a security disaster, but it also means that you can block those annoying ads on smart TVs if you’re so inclined.
- By generating a certificate for Samsung's advertising domains using a compromised eMudhra signing key, and configuring his router to direct requests for those domains to a server on his home network, Vrátil was able to replace ads with family photos served from his NAS.
That said, smart TVs that are out of support may never receive such an update, leaving them exposed to the certificate weakness even if their owners block the ads.
Additional details
- As mentioned above, it’s on GitHub for those who want to trick their TV, if it still supports eMudhra certificates, but you’ll have to do the legwork to dissect how your device is getting ads and tweak the code to work.
- “And while replacing ads on a TV's home screen with pictures of my family is fun, there are also countless much more sinister applications of this vulnerability.” As for Vrátil….
- The company has blamed a bad software script put in place to generate keys that its hardware couldn’t handle as the root of the issue.
- eMudhra has since left the CA racket, saying that it wasn’t a big deal to it since issuing certs was a small part of its business.
- By Vrátil’s account, swapping out annoying ads for pictures of his family on his TV’s main screen was a pretty simple task.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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