Large-Scale Security Analysis of Real-World Backend Deployments Speaking IoT-Focused Protocols

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09662v2
• Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:52:15 GMT
• Title: Large-Scale Security Analysis of Real-World Backend Deployments Speaking IoT-Focused Protocols
• Abstract summary: We focus on the security of backends speaking IoT protocols, that is, the backbone of the IoT ecosystem. We gather a dataset of over 337,000 provider data to investigate three major security threats: information, weak authentication, and denial of service. We find that 9.44% backends expose information, 30.38% CoAP-speaking backends are vulnerable to denial of service attacks, and 99.84% of backends use insecure transport protocols.
• Score: 4.843690497661255
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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).

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