Skip to content

GettingStarted

Jump to bottom
Spencer McIntyre edited this page Feb 19, 2018 · 5 revisions

Getting Started

Background

Termineter interacts with smart meters using the ANSI C12.18 protocol over a serial connection. The ANSI Type-2 optical probe that is in use must provide a serial interface.

Basic Steps

Below is a summary of the basic steps to get started with Termineter after the environment has been configured.

  1. Connect the optical probe to the smart meter and start Termineter
  2. Configure the connection options. On Windows, this would be something like COM1 and on Linux something like /dev/ttyS0. Check Configuring the Connection for more details.
  3. Use the connect command, this will also check that the meter is responding.

Configuring the Environment

Basic Requirements

Linux

Running the install.sh script is optional. Termineter can be run using Python out of the source directory.

On Linux some USB optical probes use an FTDI chip to provide a serial connection and may not immediately show up in/dev/. To remedy this use the lsusb command and search for a line saying "Future Technology Devices International" and next to it should be two hexadecimal strings separated by a colon. The first half is the Vendor ID and the second half is the Product ID as they need to be passed to the modpobe command. Proceed to use the modprobe command to load the ftdi-sio drivers with the appropriate vendor and product options.

Example:

[someone@localhost ~]$ lsusb   
Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0403:f458 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd    
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub   
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub    
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub   
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub    
[someone@localhost ~]$ sudo modprobe ftdi-sio vendor=0x0403 product=0xf458    
[someone@localhost ~]$ ls /dev/tty* | grep USB   
/dev/ttyUSB0    
[someone@localhost ~]$

Windows

Termineter can only be run from the source directory with Python, no installation process is provided.

Configuring the Connection

This option is passed into the PySerial library so any valid value for the "port" parameter can be used. If the PySerial library is new enough the serial_for_url function will be used which allows using RFC2217 serial bridge via a URL such as: rfc2217://192.168.90.128:

Other options for the connection can be viewed and set using the Framework-level "Advanced Options". These options include STOPBITS, BYTESIZE, and BAUDRATE.

Other Notes

The USE_HEX Option

Some options in modules have a USE_HEX option, this means that the corresponding value is provided as a string of hex characters and should be converted to binary before being sent to the meter. This is also the case for the PASSWORD_HEX option which when set to "True" means the password is expressed as a hex string.

Resource Files

Like with Metasploit, a resource file can be executed automatically every time the framework starts. This can be helpful to avoid having to manually configure the connection options each time Termineter starts. The user simply needs to place each command that they would like to run on a new line in the file.

On Linux the file can placed in ~/.termineter/console.rc and it will automatically be run every time Termineter starts. Additionally a resource file can be explicitly loaded on start by using the -r / --rc-file options.

Clone this wiki locally