Securing Internet of Things

Securing the IOT

IOT

WHERE IS THIS LEADING ?

What we can IMAGINE for the years to come ?

DREAMS

• Intelligent cars to drive our pets (everybody knows Bosco and Rocky)

OF YESTERDAY

• Intelligent shopping carts which interact with our smart home to assist us in shopping

ARE HOPES

1)Intelligent school/office bus which tells us it’s GPS location all the time so we are never late.

OF TODAY

• Smart sensors which tells us for how long our employees/students were on their seat

My boss on seat or not ??

AND REALITY OF TOMORROW

4)Smart beds which automatically wake us up (in case we have something urgent to do)

5)Smart utensils which tells our doctors about what we ate in last 3 months

6)Smart meters to regulate flow of electricity in our houses and buildings

7)Well today we have technology much beyond what we usually imagine . . . .

ARCHITECTURE OF IOT

• Internet OF Things

IOT relies on satellites, Cellular networks and all the telecommunication system apartFrom cloud, conventional networking and computing systems.

Implementation of IOT also relies on:

WHAT IOT SECURITY MEANS

• IOT Security is really about understanding threats at all the different layers included at all the different levels

• Threat modeling in IOT is really about understanding threats at different levels and then designing the security of application based on it’s required functionality.

LEVEL-1

• How do I authenticate my sensors and what could be the possible risk?

• Challenges:

• Small size

• No memory or processing power

• Physical security

• Example: temperature sensor, alcohol sensor, pir sensor

MITIGATION

• Possible solutions:

• Use of micro-controllers (which then come with their own challenges of course)

• Authentication problems can be solved

• Encryption can be used

SECURITY ENCRYPTION

• Xbee as a transport agent

OTHER SENSORS

• There are some sensors whose operation depends on Physical Quantities like (temperature, sound) etc.

• And on the other hand, there are sensors which don’t directly use physical quantities. Rather they rely on other equipment(like satellites for their operation)

• Example is GPS technology

Global Positioning System

• GPS Spoofing is yet another challenge to face.

Problem

• What is GPS spoofing?

• The problem traces it’s route back to the basic working of the GPS

• A GPS receiver constantly talks to the satellites

GPS RECIEVER

SATELLITEFREQUENCY

HOW ATTACK WORKS

• A GPS spoofing attack attempts to deceive a GPS receiver by broadcasting counterfeit GPS signals, structured to resemble a set of normal GPS signals, or by rebroadcasting genuine signals captured elsewhere or at a different time

• These spoofed signals may be modified in such a way as to cause the receiver to estimate its position to be somewhere other than where it actually is, or to be located where it is but at a different time, as determined by the attacker

PROOF OF CONCEPT

• A "proof-of-concept" attack was successfully performed in June, 2013, when the luxury yacht "White Rose" was misdirected with spoofed GPS signals from Monaco to the island of Rhodes by a group of aerospace engineering students from the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin

• It has been suggested that the capture of a Lockheed RQ-170 drone aircraft in northeastern Iran in December, 2011, was the result of such an attack

Possible Solutions

• RAIM (Receiver autonomous integrity monitoring)

• Use of Artificial Intelligent Algorithms to catch the difference in patterns (Only applicable if the path to be taken by a device is know in advance and measure of deviation from original path is monitored)

LEVEL-2

Let’s look at the Hardware technology on which IOT architecture Relies. (taking only gateway hardware into consideration)

Apps

OS/Services

Hardware/Firmware e.g. ARM, INTEL, QUALCOMM,BROADCOM, AVR, FREESCALE etc

e.g. LINUX, RTOS etc and services providedBy them

Custom IOT applications written in either Python, Java or C/C++ or any other language

Possible Attacks on Processor

• What are the different ways in which a hardware is compromised?

• ARM (Advanced Risk Machines) has outlined 3 types of Hardware Attacks

Hardware Threats to IOT

• Hack attack• A hack attack is one where the hacker is only capable of executing a

software attack. Examples of hack attacks include viruses and malware which are downloaded to the device via a physical or a wireless connection.

• In many cases of a successful hack attack the device user inadvertently approves the installation of the software that then executes the attack. This is either because the malware pretends to be a piece of the software that the user does want to install, or because the user does not understand the warning messages displayed by the operating environment.

• In the book “Securing Java” there is a section which sums up the decision making capability of the typical user when it comes to choosing between security and desirable functionality:

• “Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.”

IOT Security Risks

• Shack attack• A shack attack is a low-budget hardware attack, using equipment

that could be bought on the high street from a store such as Radio Shack. In these scenarios the attackers have physical access to the device, but not enough equipment or expertise to attack within the integrated circuit packages.

• The attackers can attempt to connect to the device using JTAG debug and built-in self test facilities. They can passively monitor the system using logic probes and network analyzers to snoop bus lines, pins and system signals. The attackers may also be able to perform simple active hardware attacks, such as forcing pins and bus lines to be at a high or low voltage, reprogramming memory devices, and replacing hardware components with malicious alternatives.

Unique Secret per Device

• Lab attack• The lab attack vector is the most comprehensive and invasive. If the attacker has

access to laboratory equipment, such as electron microscopes, they can perform unlimited reverse engineering of the device. It must be assumed that the attacker can reverse engineer transistor-level detail for any sensitive part of the design -including logic and memories.

• Attackers can reverse engineer a design, attach microscopic logic probes to silicon metal layers, and glitch a running circuit using lasers or other techniques. Attackers can also monitor analog signals, such as device power usage and electromagnetic emissions, to perform attacks such as cryptographic key analysis.

• In most cases, considering the rule of thumb that states every device can be broken, a device should not try and defend against lab attack directly, but should take measures which limit the damage when a device is broken and therefore make the lab attack uneconomical. Use of per-device unique secrets is one example where reverse engineering a single device provides the attacker with no useful information; they have the secret for the device that they already own, but not any of the other devices in that class.

Feasibility of these attacks

• Hardware attacks are less common because:

• Not every attacker has access to a lab or specialized skills and equipment required

• Firmware vulnerabilities can be patched

• OS’es can be made hard

• Attacker (in many cases) need to be physically present to attack the hardware, which makes it a little difficult

That’s it about hardware attacks?

• The story of hardware hacking should have ended here

But then came the base !!

• But the truth is that many people access internet using cellular services

• IOT is possible with moving devices only if we use GPRS, 3G, 4G services

And Baseband can act as the base for all Hardware hacking to start.It is the not the second but the first doorUsed by hackers to come in.

• Most devices use baseband processors to talk to BTS stations

• Mobile phones being the best example

• Baseband processor is different from application processor

• But they are usually packaged into the same SOC

What is the Problem?

• The problem is:

• Most baseband processors use proprietary firmware from companies like ‘qualcomm, broadcomm and so on.

• Researchers show that there are many vulnerabilities in these firmwares

• And what makes things more interesting is that they can be attacked remotely

• But we are using cell-phones from decades without problems?

Problems with Cellular Setup

• Initially it was not possible for an attacker or security researcher to set his own “BTS” just for attack/research purpose

• Now it has become much easier with things like:

• OpenBTS (open software)

• IDA (used for reverse engineering)

• Raspberry pi ??? Why raspberry pi.

• Any radio front-end (to generate frequency signals)

• What is the depth of penetration of these attacks??• It depends upon: • Whether app-processor and baseband processor share

ram or their communication is hardened??• Moreover it depends upon what is allowed by the

vulnerability being exploited• In some cases it is possible to hijack the system

completely bypassing all security mechanisms implemented by app-processor

• Stack overflows and Heap overflows are most common attacks

Impact

• What could be the impact of cellular based attacks:

• Millions of devices could be compromised by a single vulnerability

• GSM is still the most popular network in the world

Suggested by Researchers

• Possible ways of mitigating the risk:

• Isolation of memory used by the processors

• In many cases use of a serial communication, only AT cmd interface

• Scanning the data being received from the baseband processors

Level-3

• After sensors and hardware, the next level is protection at OS and software levels.

• This levels is most vulnerable to attacks

• Mostly attackers get into systems because of vulnerable OS software or weakness in the applications being served on the top of different software stacks

When Raspberry is the GAteway

• Raspberry Pi is becoming increasing popular among IOT enthusiasts

• If we search ExploitDB with keyword ‘Raspberry PI’ we can easily find shell codes targeted towards the ARM architecture

• Hardening the raspberry is therefore another challenge while designing apps for the IOT

Hardening the PI

• What are some of the common ways of hardening IOT hub (in general) and specifically Raspberry PI (running the Rasbian OS)

Make it hard for attackers

• General Precautionary measures:

• Create a new user with your USERNAME and set a strong PASSWORD (many scanners come these days which try to login using pi/raspberry pair)

• Delete the default pi/raspberry user account from your system

• Use a strong password (Check for list of black-listed password on internet and avoid them)

• Decide what you really want to do with your PI, and disable any unused services

• Rasbian comes pre-configured with JDK, php, python, perl and many such programming and other tools which may not at all be required but could be potential ATTACK VECTORS

• Disable all such un-used software• E.g. Do you really need a web server running? If

not disable it• If you don’t use java, just “purge the JDK” and all

related tools

• If Apache is required, then be sure to secure it using the OWASP best practices on hardening an apache server

• Make sure to do the same with other services like MySQL, NGINX

• OWASP (http://owasp.org) is a good source of information on how we can secure our servers and services running.

• Decide whether you need to ssh into your PI

• If yes make sure to use public/private key pair for authentication of use strong passwords

• Disable remote login as a root user

• Change the default ssh port

• Use Account Lockout after 3-5 failed attempts

• Add another layer of security using techniques like PORT-KNOCKING

• Configure logging to monitor logins and failed login attempts

• Install and configure iptables

• More defensive measures:

• Honeypots can be deployed.

• https://redmine.honeynet.org/projects/honeeepi/wiki

• Honeeepi is a project based on setting up honeynets with raspberry pi

• Encrypt only the folder which contain useful data

• Full Disk Encryption could be an expensive operation in context of Raspberry pi therefore we should try to avoid it

• Execute application code from trusted sources only

Level-4

• Authenticating the IOT Hub to the cloud API

Web Interface Security

• Never use un-encrypted channel for data transfer

• Use of TLS is mandatory

• Use 2 factor (multi-factor where applicable and appropriate) authentication for critical operations

• OTP is one the methods which can be used when a user performs operations like:

• Changing password, deleting data, updating permissions etc

Privacy Concerns

• Privacy Concerns among users is another major challenge to the wide spread acceptance of the IOT

• Providing sufficient controls to users so they can allow/block who access their data is important

• At the same time, it should not compromise the user experience

Using 3rd party api’s

• With IOT, use of 3rd party API’s like Twitter, Facebook, IFTTT, Google+ is very common and expected to increase.

• It is important to make sure that vulnerabilities in 3rd party api’s doesn’t compromise our app’s data in any way

• Therefore when using 3rd pary api’s user’s data should be exposed in a limited way

Security Configurability

• ‘Lack of Security Configurability’ is on of the major reasons for weakness in IOT devices as of today.

• Therefore user should be able to easily configure the basic and advanced security

• Log’s collected from client (IOT hub) and web + mobile interface can be collected at one place and co-related to raise alerts in case of any abnormal patterns

Account Lock and Forgot Password

• Forget password is one of the most popular insecure being.

• Password reset attacks can be made difficult by taking away the control from web-interface all together (Number of users has to be taken into account)

• Similarly alert can be raised if more than a threshold number of failed login attempts are observed.