Universal Radio Hacker: A Suite for Analyzing and Attacking Stateful Wireless Protocols

Proprietary wireless protocols used by IoT devices are designed under size and energy constraints, often neglecting the security. Therefore, attacks like opening wireless door locks or stealing cars are realistic threats. Software Defined Radios (SDR) propose a generic way to investigate such protocols as they can send and receive on nearly arbitrary frequencies. Most tools for SDR, however, focus on the HF side and offer little support for analyzing the actual protocol logic so custom tools or excel spreadsheets must be used. In this paper, we present the Universal Radio Hacker (URH), an open source tool which is designed for protocol analysis from the ground up and implements a full workflow including interfaces for SDRs, intuitive demodulation, customizable decodings, fuzzing support and a simulation component. URH splits the process down into the phases Interpretation, Analysis, Generation and Simulation, whereby results from one phase can be transferred to the other. The software offers all features needed for protocol investigation without overwhelming users with complexity. URH is developed with theoretic oriented researchers in mind who want to focus on protocol logic and try to avoid diving into the depths of HF and Digital Signal Processing.