Automated Security Analysis of IoT Software Updates

Abstract

IoT devices often operate unsupervised in ever-changing environments for several years. Therefore, they need to be updated on a regular basis. Current approaches for software updates on IoT, like the recent SUIT proposal, focus on granting integrity and confidentiality but do not analyze the content of the software update, especially the IoT application which is deployed to IoT devices. To this aim, in this paper, we present IoTAV, an automated software analysis framework for systematically verifying the security of the applications contained in software updates w.r.t. a given security policy. Our proposal can be adopted transparently by current IoT software updates workflows. We prove the viability of IoTAV by testing our methodology on a set of actual RIOT OS applications. Experimental results indicate that the approach is viable in terms of both reliability and performance, leading to the identification of 26 security policy violations in 31 real-world RIOT applications.

A (in)Secure-by-Design IoT Protocol

“…The most common reverse engineering techniques employed for IoT security analysis rely on network packets inspection or on more complex analysis of device firmware images. Several methodologies have been proposed in recent years to automate the analysis of device firmware, leveraging on techniques such as formal methods, fuzzing, static analysis and signature matching [13,14,27,29]. Recently, in addition to the analysis of firmware images, the automatic inspection of companion applications also proved to be an effective strategy [19,26].…”

PARIOT: Anti-Repackaging for IoT Firmware Integrity

“…As the firmware has a central role in the life cycle of an IoT device, its security has raised serious concerns from the scientific and industrial community. To this aim, several works were proposed to evaluate the security of the firmware bundle (like [4] or [5]) and enforce the update mechanisms (e.g., [6] and [7]).…”