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…

The competition sees hackers compete to discover a 0 day code execution vulnerability, on one of three laptops running Mac OSX, Windows Vista or Ubuntu. The winners take the pwned laptop plus a generous cash award.

Mac OSX (10.5.2) fell on day two, after the discovery of a vulnerability in the Safari web browser allowed a team from Independent Security Evaluators to remotely exploit an Apple MacBook Air. Day three saw Shane Macauly of Security Objectives defeat the Windows Vista (SP1) laptop using an exploit against the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Well done Ubuntu.