Two students find security bug that could let millions do laundry for free

Bro don't fucken tell the company wtf.
- That's how it works in security. It is unethical to not give the company time to react before public disclosure.
  
  Dont disclose it. Let people who cant afford wash their clothes
  
  I think they meant that if the students hadn't told the company, they and their classmates could have done their laundry for free.
- Fucking it up for the rest of us

His hat is only white because he got to test this a bunch before exposing the vulnerability.
- HEAR YE HEAR YE! best comment here! Hahaha
- When I found a loophole for cheap Wendy's food, I absolutely abused it a dozen times as a poor college student. It involves receipts and going to different Wendy's.
  
  Hey I think every white hat deserves some leniency in their Robin Hooding haha.

In this case this is fucked up. Let people wash dammit
- Not the same company, but I live in apartments with washer/dryers like this. Coin op entirely removed.
  You have to have a device that is bluetooth capable to use them.
  Anyway pretty sure someone in this apartment has figured out something similar because the machines keep magically becoming unpaid machines after they get serviced. After each service, they will be asking for money to be able to be used for like a day or so, but then soon enough, I'll go back to the laundry room and all the machines will be free and not asking for money. Just ready to go, no device required.
  Originally, I thought it was the company disabling them due to like a data breach or something and was trying to find out if there was an undisclosed data leak and/or a class action lawsuit brewing. Since neither of those are the case, I'm pretty sure it's a Notorious Do-Gooder.
  So, thanks, Notorious Do-Gooder, for all the free washes and drys.
  (Especially since this same idea crossed my mind over a year ago but I've just been too lazy to view the bluetooth data traffic myself)
  
  You're welcome, how's the free cable too by the way?
  
  Saw a video that showed using swizzle sticks jammed into the coin slots to release the lock and get free laundry.
  I had bike spokes laying around and tried it. It worked, but actually broke the coin slots. Management reconfig’d to other slots, which I then broke.
  Laundry was only 25 cents if you knew which slot to put a quart into.
- Honestly coin machines aren't that bad as they don't require you to pay a internet bill and they don't have cyber issues.
  Sure it might be inconvenient but you can just have a machine that converts bills to coins like they have at car washes.
- They could!
  Obviously we need UBI cuz…
  Capitalism. “Free” washes would increase rent. And benefit high-volume washers! Might increase lines though (wash more often with no skin in the game), pull back people who may be using laundromats as an alternative. Detrimental to low-volume washing households.
  Mostly I’d say it’s an optics thing. Cost per year to exist wouldn’t change much, but clearly public opinion could.

Fun.
From the article, the linked Swagger docs : https://web.archive.org/web/20240120071238/https://mycscgo.com/api/v1/docs/static/index.html#/
And a little more detailed account : https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/how-this-security-bug-in-washing-machines-can-help-college-students-in-the-us-do-free-laundry/articleshow/110277923.cms
It looks like these laundry machines are controlled by a mobile app, and requests are routed through The Internet(tm). The flaw appears to be the web service presumes a user is only able to gain access to their API endpoints via the mobile app, which only exposes certain functions to a user.
Once authorized, though, there's no further checks like oauth scopes or even user roles, to prevent someone from doing a little bit of lateral movement to admin-style endpoints.
Lazy. The machine makers should be ashamed.
- I once took over an app that worked like this. Access to one thing? Access to everything! And they had a hard coded admin password in the server code. 🤦 The client wasn't happy when I proposed a complete rewrite. Eventually my manager begged me to stop working with them, so we did.

I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.
- When i used to go to france for my family holiday every year (i live in southeast england so not far) i used to take as many 2p coins as i could because they were close enough to the €2 coin to work in those insert and twist sweet/small toy machines
  
  British coins really seem absurdly overly-beefy for the monetary value they represent. I think it's a way of saving up metal for the next time the Germans need sorting out.
- I used to work as a teller and we used to run magnets on every roll of quarters that came in from laundry mats and car washes. While the weight is correct, American coins are never magnetic. Every single time it's the laundry mats that foot the bill.

I used to go to a laundromat that used something like a smartcard to keep your balance. You'd refill it at the kiosk and swipe it at the washer/dryer.
I had a reader/writer around somewhere from a few years prior, when I was messing around with old Echostar boxes.
Wish I could have found it. Those machines didn't look to be connected to anything. I didn't see any wireless networks in the area and the equipment didn't have any data lines.
I'm almost willing to bet the balance was stored as an value on the card and gets read/rewritten with every swipe, and essentially just security-through-obscurity. Meaning I could either back up and rewrite a $20 card forever, or rewrite the balance to having FF credits or whatever.
- It could be simply obscure like you say, but the absence of a network doesn't guarantee it's that easy to hack.
  They could use a checksum and your trick would invalidate the card until you figured out the correct algorithm, which would require a new visit to the laundromat for every new attempt, so basically impractical.
  That or the card is just simply encrypted, which would make it impossible to interpret. It would be easy to implement too because the shared secret is between machines that are all physically controlled by the laundromat.
  
  If there's no central control or ledger, couldn't you just rewrite the card with the original values and the machines wouldn't know any difference?
  
  A simple encryption key would make the most sense. It wouldn't even need to be that complex. All you would need is a way to verify the card and then another one that represents the number. You probably could just use some primes.
  
  I mean how many people are gonna be walking around with card rw
  
  Meaning I could either back up and rewrite a $20 card forever, or rewrite the balance to having FF credits or whatever.
  As you can guess, checksum is stored somewhere. And that somewhere happens to be card that was just dumped.
- There also is a point of cost. They aren't going to spend a bunch of money securing a laundromat. If they spend a bunch of money left and right your laundry fees would be pricy. Not to mention a laundryman isn't exactly a high profit business.
  
  I agree with the first part of your comment, but laundromats are absolutely a high profit business.
  source: family friend owns a bunch of them, every single one was net profitable inside of a few months and they are now basically pure profit month over month. They make more money than I ever have from a single software development job, even at my peak, and they largely just farm maintenance out and pay some labor.
- how much would it be get a reader? What skills would I need to keep resetting the amount?

Here’s a reminder that most washing machines use a universal key, which you can buy online for like $5. You can just pop it open and hit the little “coin inserted” switch to make it think you paid.
- Just hope they don’t have cameras.
  
  Steal those too
- Are you sure the key is universal? I dont need the make and model?
  
  I mean, the owner can choose to re-key it. But there are only a few manufacturers for them. Most laundromats use Speed Queen machines, for instance. And the manufacturer ships them with a single universal key, so the owner isn’t left juggling like forty different keys for a single laundromat. If every machine had a unique key, the owners would need to have a bunch of different keys just to service everything at the end of the day.

God forbid
- But have you thought about the owner?
  
  They have yacht expenses!

The west has fallen, millions must do laundry for free.
- That company is really getting taken to the cleaners.
  
  At least it's free for them now!

I had free laundry for most of my freshman year of college. We had coin operated machines, and somebody quickly figured out that you can strip 2 wires and just touch them together, or touch a coin to both of them, and every time you did that the machine would think a coin had been inserted. Eventually the college caught on and one day I went down there and all the machines were taken apart with maintenance guys working on them, and after that there was a heavy duty housing for the coin acceptor with no exposed wires. It was nice while it lasted!
- Is it USSA?

This is the best summary I could come up with:
That’s because of a vulnerability that two University of California, Santa Cruz students found in internet-connected washing machines in commercial use in several countries, according to TechCrunch.
The two students, Alexander Sherbrooke and Iakov Taranenko, apparently exploited an API for the machines’ app to do things like remotely command them to work without payment and update a laundry account to show it had millions of dollars in it.
CSC never responded when Sherbrooke and Taranenko reported the vulnerability via emails and a phone call in January, TechCrunch writes.
That includes that the company has a published list of commands, which the two told TechCrunch enables connecting to all of CSC’s network-connected laundry machines.
CSC’s vulnerability is a good reminder that the security situation with the internet of things still isn’t sorted out.
For the exploit the students found, maybe CSC shoulders the risk, but in other cases, lax cybersecurity practices have made it possible for hackers or company contractors to view strangers’ security camera footage or gain access to smart plugs.
The original article contains 294 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- Sherbrooke and Taranenko reported the vulnerability
  Finks :(
  
  Forreal, I highly doubt CSC has a big bounty program so why did they even bother? Guaranteed they were the "Teacher you forgot our homework" kids
  
  Honestly, in this case, the company in question are even bigger finks because they don't actually care about fixing a vulnerability that could cost them money.
  If that speaks to their security practices, well... Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if customer data was all in an unsecured, unencrypted, plain-text Microsoft Word document.

There used to be this music festival in my college town and they liked to charge absurd money for "tokens" to use at the vendors. I didn't use all of them but I found they worked in the parking meters (I think they detected as slugs, because they immediately gave me an hour and flashed the meter) but nobody in the city bothered to ticket me for it. I dunno, I felt kinda bad but at the same time, I don't like to parallel park.
For what its worth, I paid more for the tokens than I ever did parking.

I've never heard of CSC, only Coinamatic in every commercially run residential coin laundry I have seen (in Canada). They run on coins or chip cards.
- I'm in the midwest and have used csc at every apartment I've lived at. Maybe it's regional?