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Data Shows IOT Security is Moving Backward
The security of IoT devices has been a running joke for many years, so much so that some researchers have given up trying to point out the weaknesses and get vendors to address the problems. Some vendors have pledged to do better and improve their development practices, but a year-long analysis of the security features in the firmware of 22 IoT device manufacturers found that not only are the vendors not making progress on security, they're actually going backward.
[...] The team wanted to see how IoT vendors were faring in adding standard hardening features to their firmware binaries, so it developed a special methodology that began with downloading available firmware updates from vendor websites, extracting Linux filesystems from the firmware, and then running each binary through the CITL's custom analytic tools. The dataset comprises more than 3.3 million individual binaries from nearly 5,000 firmware updates from 22 vendors, including ASUS, D-Link, Belkin, QNAP, and Mikrotik, and goes back as far as 2003.
What the team found is dispiriting, if not surprising: IoT firmware hardening is getting worse rather than better. Firmware updates are more likely to remove binary hardening features than to add them, and overall there hasn't been any trend in a positive direction for security in the 15 years covered by the CITL dataset.
[...] The CITL study looked for the presence of a number of possible hardening techniques, such as ASLR, non-executable stacks, and stack guards. These technologies are used to mitigate the effects of certain vulnerabilities and have been in wide use in the desktop and server worlds for many years. They have begun to make their way into IoT device firmware in the last few years, but the CITL data shows that updates often remove one or more of the hardening flags and some updates significantly reduce the overall security of the firmware. For example, one update shipped in 2017 by Ubiquiti for its UAP-HD line of wireless access points removed ASLR altogether and the presence of stack guards went from about 70 percent of binaries to virtually none.
[...] Although IoT devices often are associated with consumer applications, a tremendous amount of IoT gear finds its way into enterprise environments, as well, whether it's through official purchases or shadow installations by employees. Many of the firmware images the CITL study looked at are from networking devices, which are vital to enterprises and therefore quite valuable for attackers.
"We found major regressions in access points you would ship to enterprises by the crate. When you take these things in aggregate, that's a very soft target. It's a very low cost to find an exploit in those," Thompson said.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 28 2019, @12:53AM (3 children)
I could probably get somewhere with some tinkering, but that seems like an awful lot of work to put into something that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday August 28 2019, @01:13AM (2 children)
Don't be so categorical.
I have a number of gizmos working as intended to make possible something I couldn't do otherwise - e.g. keeping a garden watered at over 200km from me, without wasting water (can't get enough of it) over many successive days with over 40C temperature. My design, my implementation, works well and I can keep my job and my garden, when without them it would have been an either/or choice between them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @01:44AM (1 child)
The point is, these devices should all run on Free Software and be fully controllable by the user. You should never be forced to use third party servers, and they should never spy on you. They should be freedom-respecting and privacy-respecting right out of the box.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 28 2019, @02:03AM
Agreed with the second, the first is likely a consequence of it for mass-produced gizmos, but not a strong requirement for custom non-generalizeable circumstances resulting in an one-off implementation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford