Broadcast

Abstract

A billion households worldwide receive digital television, employing broadcast standards such as Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB). Interactive applications can be signaled and transported using the widely deployed Hybrid Broadcast Broadband Television (HbbTV) standard. The DVB and HbbTV standards, however, lack mandatory authentication and integrity mechanisms for the transmitted data. This allows a remote attacker to replace legitimate broadcasts by overpowering the regular radio signal. The attacker-controlled signal can then deliver, e.g., a malicious HbbTV application, which in turn can be used to exploit local security vulnerabilities on Smart TVs (STV) in range. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to practically demonstrate that modern STVs can be compromised remotely by malware transmitted over-the-air using DVB systems. A proof-of-concept and several experiments are developed to assess important real-world properties of DVB-assisted attacks. New results on the reach of such an attack and its detectability are presented, which are used to propose an efficient protection scheme to secure existing and future HbbTV-enabled receivers.