I think the article may also be confusing OLT and ONT. 

They are talking about how the “OLT” that is vulnerable is the device that translates the fibre into the copper Ethernet connected to customers equipment which may indicate these are actually ONT’s being talked about or the article authors got their explanation confused. 

For these to be internet exposed presumably they must be including a router function and not simply doing some bridging of customer traffic. 

I haven’t checked (on mobile) but those affected model numbers could confirm if it’s OLT, ONT, or both. Possibly the confusion could come from the bug affecting both. 

Regards
Alexander

Alexander Neilson
Neilson Productions Limited
021 329 681
alexander@neilson.net.nz

On 11/07/2020, at 08:04, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org> wrote:

 The “WAN” port of an OLT _is_ it’s management port. Data, IPTV, and VoIP traffic pass on VLANs, typically encrypted. These are passive optical network (PON) devices, where all CPE in a group of, say, 32 premises receive the same light via an optical splitter. Thus network partitioning is a requirement of the architecture. There is no concept of a traditional “WAN” port facing the Internet. 

-mel via cell

On Jul 10, 2020, at 12:21 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:


Um, from the article it appears that this isn’t on the Management interface, but the WAN port of the OLT.

Owen


On Jul 10, 2020, at 11:01 , Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org> wrote:

But who, who I ask, opens their management interface to the public Internet?!?!

Maybe this is vulnerability if you have a compromised management network, but anybody who opens CPE up to the Internet is just barking mad :-)

-mel via cell

On Jul 10, 2020, at 10:00 AM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: