Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, ranging from smart home assistants to health devices, are pervasive: Forecasts estimate their number to reach 29 billion by 2030. Understanding the security of their machine-to-machine communication is crucial. Prior work focused on identifying devices' vulnerabilities or proposed protocol-specific solutions. Instead, we investigate the security of backends speaking IoT protocols, that is, the backbone of the IoT ecosystem. We focus on three real-world protocols for our large-scale analysis: MQTT, CoAP, and XMPP. We gather a dataset of over 337,000 backends, augment it with geographical and provider data, and perform non-invasive active measurements to investigate three major security threats: information leakage, weak authentication, and denial of service. Our results provide quantitative evidence of a problematic immaturity in the IoT ecosystem. Among other issues, we find that 9.44% backends expose information, 30.38% CoAP-speaking backends are vulnerable to denial of service attacks, and 99.84% of MQTT- and XMPP-speaking backends use insecure transport protocols (only 0.16% adopt TLS, of which 70.93% adopt a vulnerable version).
@article{arxiv.2405.09662,
title = {Large-Scale Security Analysis of Real-World Backend Deployments Speaking IoT-Focused Protocols},
author = {Carlotta Tagliaro and Martina Komsic and Andrea Continella and Kevin Borgolte and Martina Lindorfer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.09662},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Appeared at the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2024)