All posts by Alexander Vetterl

Three Paper Thursday: Will we ever get IoT security right?

Academia, governments and industry frequently talk about the importance of IoT security. Fundamentally, the IoT environment has similar problems to other technology platforms such as Android: a fragmented market with no clear responsibilities or incentives for vendors to provide regular updates, and consumers for whom its not clear how much (of a premium) they are willing to pay for (“better”) security and privacy.

Just two weeks ago, Belkin announced to shut down one of its cloud services, effectively transforming its several product lines of web cameras into useless bricks. Unlike other end-of-support announcements for IoT devices that (only) mean devices will never see an update again, many Belkin cameras simply refuse to work without the “cloud”. This is particularly disconcerting  as many see cloud-based IoT as one possible solution to improve device security by easing the user maintenance effort through remote update capabilities.

In this post, I would like to introduce three papers, each talking about different aspects of IoT security: 1) consumer purchasing behaviour, 2) vendor response, and 3) an assessment of the ever-growing literature on “best-practices” from industrial, governmental, and academic sources.
Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Will we ever get IoT security right?

Honware: A Virtual Honeypot Framework for Capturing CPE and IoT Zero Days

Existing defenses are slow to detect zero day exploits and capture attack traffic targeting inadequately secured Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This means that attackers have considerable periods of time to find and compromise vulnerable devices before the attack vectors are well understood and mitigation is in place.

About a month ago we presented honware at eCrime 2019, a new honeypot framework that enables the rapid construction of honeypots for a wide range of CPE and IoT devices. The framework automatically processes a standard firmware image (as is commonly provided for updates) and runs the system with a special pre-built Linux kernel without needing custom hardware. It then logs attacker traffic and records which of their actions led to a compromise.

We provide an extensive evaluation and show that our framework is scalable and significantly better than existing emulation strategies in emulating the devices’ firmware applications. We were able to successfully process close to 2000 firmware images across a dozen brands (TP-Link, Netgear, D-Link…) and run them as honeypots. Also, as we use the original firmware images, the honeypots are not susceptible to fingerprinting attacks based on protocol deviations or self-revealing properties.

By simplifying the process of deploying realistic honeypots at Internet scale, honware supports the detection of malware types that often go unnoticed by users and manufactures. We hope that honware will be used at Internet scale by manufacturers setting up honeypots for all of their products and firmware versions or by researchers looking for new types of malware.

The paper is available here.

Bitter Harvest: Systematically Fingerprinting Low- and Medium-interaction Honeypots at Internet Scale

Next week we will present a new paper at USENIX WOOT 2018, in which we show that we can find low- and medium-interaction honeypots on the Internet with a few packets. So if you are running such a honeypot (Cowrie, Glastopf, Conpot etc.), then “we know where you live” and the bad guys might soon as well.

In total, we identify 7,605 honeypot instances across nine different honeypot implementations for the most important network protocols SSH, Telnet, and HTTP.

These honeypots rely on standard libraries to implement large parts of the transport layer, but they were never intended to provide identical behaviour to the systems being impersonated. We show that fixing the identity string pretending to be OpenSSH or Apache and not “any” library or fixing other common identifiers such as error messages is not enough. The problem is that there are literally thousands of distinguishing protocol interactions, part of the contribution of the paper is to show how to pick the “best” one. Even worse, to fingerprint these honeypots, we do not need to send any credentials so it will be hard to tell from the logging that you have been detected.

We also find that many honeypots are deployed and forgotten about because part of the fingerprinting has been to determine how many people are not actively patching their systems! We find that  27% of the SSH honeypots have not been updated within the last 31 months and only 39% incorporate improvements from 7 months ago. It turns out that security professionals are as bad as anyone.

We argue that our method is a  ‘class break’ in that trivial patches cannot address the issue. Thus we need to move on from the current dominant honeypot architecture of python libraries and python programs for low- and medium-interaction honeypots. We also have developed a modified version of the OpenSSH daemon (sshd) which can front-end a Cowrie instance so that the protocol layer distinguishers will no longer work.

The paper is available here.