I just updated my Humax-HD Freesat box to the 1.00.23 firmware and decided to have a furtle with it. As this update is supposed to enable iPlayer (although it can’t be used until Freesat say so) I thought I’d try and see if anything funky was going on over the network to give me the opportunity to play with some security tools.
I used Nmap to scan the Humax and see if any ports were open. The scan didn’t return anything from TCP ports (so I’m assuming that they’re all closed), and returned unreachable for all but 10 UDP ports. The Humax didn’t send any kind of response to the scans on these 10 ports so Nmap considers them open|filtered. I checked the well known port list on wikipedia to see if any of them matched up.
1057/udp open|filtered unknown – No listing
5351/udp open|filtered unknown – Wikipedia shows as NAT Port Mapping Protocol (official). This is used to allow a NAT’ed device to communicate with devices outside of the private network. It looks to be used a lot in peer to peer file sharing.
16739/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
19935/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
20465/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
21625/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
22053/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
24606/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
47772/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
49187/udp open|filtered unknown – Not listed
I used ncat to send a few key strokes at each of these ports but got nothing back. Then again, not having a clue what could be sat behind most of them (if anything) I don’t know if I should get anything back anyway (or even if there is a service making a reply, would it reply to the same port that made the request?). A UDP service scan in Nmap also fails to get any further information.
The Humax box is connected to my home router via a powerline ethernet adaptor. As the powerline network connects into one port on the broadband router I figured that I should see traffic going between the Humax and the router from a laptop connected to another powerline adaptor using Wireshark. The scan shows that again, there’s not much going on. When the Freesat box boots up it requests an IP address using DHCP. That’s about it.
So all in all, not much info there. The only service that looks to be of interest is NAT-PMP. It makes me wonder whether or not the Humax box will try to engage in a peer to peer network when iPlayer is activated, or if the service is designed to allow the box to be contactable from outside of your home network. Who knows?
If you have any corrections, answers or suggestions then please get in touch. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
*UPDATE*
It looks like the BBC have kindly allowed the iPlayer beta test code to ‘leak’ out before its official release. Turn your freesat box over to BBC 1, press the red button and type 5483 to watch iPlayer…