Multimedia Implementations for SOHO Networks and Their Security Issues: Opening Pandora’s Box with Sonos and SonosNet

Abstract

Multimedia devices for Small Office Home Office (SOHO) environments often use proprietary technologies but also a variety of commercially available technologies for their operation. Exploiting vulnerabilities on multimedia devices and implementations that are made for SOHO environments induce new risk trends but also are a pragmatic fact. For many manufacturers usability and user friendliness take precedence over the security on these implementations. Market expansion and propagation that introduces a vast number of such devices to almost any SOHO network are also aggravating factors. This paper aims to identify, explore and analyse vulnerabilities and related attacks on such environments, focusing on specific devices manufactured by Sonos, as a proof-of-concept case study. The applied research has been done in such a way that can also be used for other SOHO devices. Real tests and attacks have been applied, in order to demonstrate and verify the proposed methodologies, as well as to evaluate all related results and findings. Finally, countermeasures and solutions for the identified vulnerabilities are proposed and evaluated.