This has nothing to do with the flipper zero or any other device using the CC1101 chip. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer of such smart meters to make them safe and if they are incapable of preventing a sub $10 chip found in thousands of devices from causing catastrophic failure then who is guaranteeing me that the meter is actually counting correctly!
This is a failure of regulators and manufacturer, the media will spin it and next thing you know flipper zeros will be banned and smart meters will be as shitty as this one.
The more media attention and crappy unauthenticated infrastructure broken, the better.
Requiring proper security in public infra creates market requirement for companies to release better, more secure, products to the public infra market. Not just whatever open radio based MVP thing they can whip up.
And that creates jobs for not just EE engineers, but as security requirements increase then it creates jobs for SW engineers also (and if the existing players are too slow, opens the market for agile startups that can do it better).
What's more, it makes our infrastructure more resilient to random RF and electronic warfare.
Interesting... I used to work on testing these old elster meters. Looking at the style number of this meter, it doesn't look like it's equipped with a disconnect relay, so at least he's not messing with that (even if a meter was equipped with a disconnect relay, the meter display should still be on during a disconnect event). I suspect he's cutting power to something other than the meter itself. I also see it's equipped with an energy axis (elster proprietary wireless network) so at the very least he'll be getting a fun visit from his power company wondering why he tripped various tamper detect flags in the meter (assuming his power company is actually ameren, a utility company in Missouri and Illinois and not canada like his yt profile says...). Since it also has that radio, I know it should also be encrypted. Unless that specific power company disabled LAN/WAN encryption... which we generally don't recommend and Canadian power infrastructure is pretty strict anyway when it comes to meter security. I'd be interested to see what exactly the flipper was communicating with (I'm sure my upper management would be even more interested as well).
edit: I also just noticed the meter is stuck in test mode and the backup battery is missing. You can actually buy these meters on ebay, which is what I'm suspecting this guy did.
The smart meter should have had better security. But the device isn't designed to switch heavy loads repeatedly, this is only meant to be used sporadically as an emergency cut-off (for instance, in case of a fire or if the customer is permanently disconnected for some reason). In case of a fire nobody cares about whether or not the smart meter survives. In case of a disconnect for administrative reasons the disconnect usually happens at night to minimize the risk of arcing.
Keep in mind that your typical electrical service is 10's of KW and that switching that kind of power repeatedly under load requires a device that is essentially sacrificial in nature. Now let's see what they charge you for that meter replacement, it's not going to be cheap.
Note that the meter isn't yours to mess with, it is in your house and on your property but from an administrative perspective your stuff starts after the mains cutoff which is downstream from the smart meter. Anything before that including the mains cutoff is the property of whoever manages the local network, either a specialized grid operator or the utility company that sells you the power. You can see which way it works by looking at your electricity bill and by whether or not you call your utility when there is a problem with the local grid or the network operator. Where I live these are separate legal entities, but in some places it is just the one.
Finally: don't mess with the grid, it's a shared resource. It is trivial to cause damage by for instance injecting power at higher voltage levels than the appliances in the houses around you can deal with, blowing up a meter before your ability to cut off can have very unpredictable effects. In theory it is all safe and it should be able to withstand some abuse but in practice older networks still exist and not all of them are equally robust. So just don't.
The apartment buildings in my area all have wireless gas leak detectors, this video makes me want to take out my HackRF and start experimenting with mine.
Flipper Zero isn't what's causing this, the bad "smart" devices are, and the culprits themselves, of course. Just because you can hack a system, doesn't make it legal. Know your local laws. Mine says "accessing any IT system without authorisation is punishable with imprisonment from 3m to 3y; accessing the aforementioned system with the purpose of obtaining data is punishable with imprisonment from 6m to 5y.", vague enough for all of these things.
I don't think that's what "self" destructs means.
You can't self destruct something else. You can only self destruct yourself.
In The Netherlands, functionality to remotely disable smart meters is forbidden by law to protect from (large scale) cyber attacks. Seeing how poor the security on this specific meter is, it only confirms that this was a great decision.
Huh? What does one mean by using the verb "self-destruct" transitively?
Everyone even marginally aware knows that modern society is held together by a thin layer of "security". The Flipper just makes what was available for a long time cheaper and more accessible.
Many many firmwares are absolute rubbish fed by solo or duo developer teams, writing crap C or worse C++ using a vendor hal, code gen tools, and a super loop.
Good luck picking it back up or having another embedded person sort out the random zup file of sources and built images that these sorts of things encompass. Using some god awful half baked custom ide.
Heyall, I'd like to point to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmNAA2bVo4Q&t=270s which may cast come doubt on the integrity of the tester
Not to read too much into a video like this, but their tone when they say "Flipper, what did you do...?" — and then a bunch *more* switching — is quite the study in humans and (ab)use/hacking of technology.
Site is down, archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609052235/https://www.rtl-s...
The article centers around this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF6o9Ec4k_o
Inductive load + relay = arcing and a bad time when disconnected.
I hope the Flipper Zero will be a wake up call to make things secure.
Otherwise, it could lead to tech not being trustworthy, or Flipper Zeros and anything like it getting banned.
It really seems like there are so many threats to technological society right now and not many people trying to defend it and make sure that in 50 years we still have access to the internet for most people and sensors monitoring our water supply.
Not having much in the way of specifics about how this wireless vulnerability was found and exploited, this is really scary. It's one thing using Flipper Zero to pop the charging port on Tesla's [1], but this is just plain dangerous!
Sadly, this will provide a lot of ammunition to those wanting to restrict this kind of device as a “hacking tool”.
I thought most compressors were soft start - Most of the gear I’ve seen waits a random amount of time before spinning up for this exact reason (Power cuts and loads of fridges, ACs, ovens, whatever coming back on at once with a big ol’ inductive load)
Poor inrush current protection. That is a 100% meter/appliance fault, not the Flipper Zero, which just operates wirelessly a switch function that has been provided by the manufacturer from the beginning.
Interesting. I have heard about the Flipper Zero but I did not know which radio chip they were using before, the CC1101 [1]. I ran a failed startup and made a bunch of arduino based boards with TI CC1200 [2] chips. I failed spectacularly to deliver on my promises made during a frantic kickstarter run, delivering about 50% of the hardware before caving to extreme burn out.
The issue is, I now have hundreds of boards with nice 64mhz Cortex M3 chips that run arduino code, and an attached CC1200 radio chip. They are pretty cute boards. But people already paid for them and I failed to deliver those to them, so I can't in good conscience sell them. Instead I have many boxes of these boards filling up space under my raised bed.
I would love to donate them to some educational purpose, but I worry they are a bit of an odd board no one would have a big use for. I guess though if the flipper zero with a similar chip is useful, maybe these can be useful too. When they communicate over the normal protocol they can have up to 1km wireless range (high above ground, no obstructions).
I do go to a hackerspace every week so I will have to bring some by and see what people say. But if anyone here has specific suggestions for places to donate them where they will actually get used, please share!
Peter Fairlie's videos are amazing!
If i were the writer/builder of Flipper I'd now be concerned SWAT were en route to arrest me for being the l33t hacker known as 4chan...
> In the video it appears that Peter was using the Flipper Zero to wireless turn the power meter on and off, which also controlled the power to a large AC unit. Eventually switching the meter on and off while under a heavy load resulted in the meter self destructing and releasing the magic smoke.
Calling out Flipper Zero for someone (ab)using the meter's remote control features cuts me the wrong way: you could've done the same with any other SDR, not just the Flipper Zero.
It's not even a surprise this happened, the cut-off is not meant to be operated constantly to cut heavy loads. Similarly you should not use a breaker to turn off heavy (or any, in that matter) loads as you're needlessly wearing down the protective device, instead of a separate cut-off switch that's designed to be replaceable. Especially since it can be positioned downstream from the protective device.
It all boils down to which part of the circuit you can easily repair in case of a fault, in this case the meter is by far the least accessible.