During a red-team engagement you must gain control of Zigbee-based smart bulbs in a corporate lobby. Radio reconnaissance shows the lamps support Touch-Link commissioning, and you have physical proximity. Which attack will most reliably give you the Zigbee network key so you can later send authenticated commands from a laptop located anywhere in the building?
Start a rogue Touch-Link commissioning exchange and use the publicly leaked ZLL master key to decrypt the transmitted network key.
Passively capture normal Zigbee beacon frames because they include the network key in clear text.
Push a crafted over-the-air firmware update that causes the bulb to print the key over its UART debug pins on reboot.
Send continuous de-authentication or energy-detection floods so the bulbs fall back to an all-zero 128-bit link key that anyone can use.
In Zigbee Light Link (ZLL) and early Zigbee 3.0 implementations, Touch-Link commissioning uses a global ZLL master key that was leaked publicly in 2015. If an attacker starts a fake Touch-Link session while close to a bulb, the device transmits the current network key encrypted only with that master key. Possessing the leaked key allows the attacker to decrypt the packet and obtain the plaintext network key, after which standard Zigbee frames can be crafted from any transceiver. Beacon frames never carry the network key, de-authentication flooding does not force a zero key, and uploading malicious firmware would require the key beforehand or physical access to internal debugging interfaces, so those methods do not provide a practical path to extraction in this scenario.
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What is Zigbee and how does it work?
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What is Touch-Link commissioning in Zigbee?
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How does the leaked ZLL master key enable attacks?
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What is Touch-Link commissioning in Zigbee?
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What is the ZLL master key, and why is its leak significant?
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Can you explain the importance of the Zigbee network key?
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