We’ve heard stories of hackers hacking their way into smart bulb vulnerabilities in the past, and now we have another one, this time involving one of the most popular smart bulbs on Amazon.
Researchers from the University of Catania and the University of London have published an article naming the TP Link Tapo L530E like a smart light bulb currently open to attack, and indeed, under the right circumstances, a hacker could even use the light bulb to get hold of your Wi-Fi password.
The document describes how an attacker in the vicinity of the Tapo L530E could “impersonate” the light bulb and trick the Tapo app into revealing not only the user’s Tapo credentials, but also the Wi-Fi router password, Sleepless computer reports.
The same exploit would allow a hacker to obtain a session key from the bulb that could be returned to the user, thereby setting the stage for man-in-the-middle attacks, the researchers say.
The Tapo L530E needs to be in setup mode for the attack to work, but a “simple” Wi-Fi deauthentication attack could trick the user into putting the bulb back into pairing mode, according to the researchers.
A combination of other vulnerabilities would allow hackers to “reuse” encrypted messages between the Tapo app and the bulb to launch denial-of-service attacks, the document continues.
Overall, the document accuses the bulb of a number of security flaws, including that the bulb doesn’t need to prove its identity to the app and a “short” and “exposed” shared secret code between the app and the light bulb. .
The researchers say TP-Link has “acknowledged” all the vulnerabilities and promised to have “started working” on fixes for both the light bulb and the Tapo app.
We’ve reached out to TP-Link for comment.
It goes without saying that if you have Tapo L530E bulbs installed in your home, you should immediately take them offline until TP-Link rolls out security patches.
Smart home devices have long been criticized for their security vulnerabilities, including devices from the biggest smart home brands.
In 2020, we learned that a The rogue smart bulb could be used to hijack a Philips Hue Bridge via a weakness in the Zigbee wireless protocol. Hue had already patched the security hole before the report came to light.
More recently, Anker-owned Eufy has come under fire following reports that reported it unencrypted video streams from Eufy security cameras could easily be intercepted.
