Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom with Matter

Summary

My friend Frank (not his real name) hosts a lot of guests at his apartment, and his complex’s intercom is what ushers them inside. You’ve probably seen them before, they look like this: The Doorking 1834-080 intercom at Frank's apartment. Up until recently, guests could find Frank’s number in the system and give it a call. If Frank recognized the people on the line, he would press a number on his dial pad, which the controller would interpret as a signal to unlock the gate. Then, management got lazy. The complex Frank lives in failed to renew their intercom’s cellular service, so it could no longer make calls for the voice system. Even after months of asking his landlord to fix it, nothing was done. Help Arrives My other friend Hazel and I arrived to visit Frank during this outage period, and he asked us to see what we could do. Here’s what we saw: A diagram of what we saw. We inspected the top box closer, giving a promising result: it was unlocked! The general layout of the box is as follows: A diagram of the voice box with wires shown. It was impossible to ignore the massive Wi-Fi/cell router in the top corner with its admin password printed right on it (not pictured). Of course, I had to investigate. Attempt 1: The Wi-Fi Router I quickly found the network and entered the login credentials shown. Of course, they weren’t changed from the defaults. I had full admin access to the router, which was awesome, until I realized that I couldn’t do very much with its basic, locked-down interface. This almost ended my exploration, but then I realized: what about SSH? AT&T, the company that makes the routers for Doorking, is smarter than a bag of rocks in that SSH is protected on their router. Sadly for them, they lose to the bag of rocks in providing a way to download their entire system configuration from the web interface, containing a way to reset the root password to whatever you want: # This file is an exported configuration from NetComm Bovine platform based device. # ...