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Embedded devices are ubiquitous. However, preliminary evidence shows that attack mitigations protecting our desktops/servers/phones are missing in embedded devices, posing a significant threat to embedded security. To this end, this paper presents an in-depth study on the adoption of common attack mitigations on embedded devices. Precisely, it measures the presence of standard mitigations against memory corruptions in over 10k Linux-based firmware of deployed embedded devices. The study reveals that embedded devices largely omit both user-space and kernel-level attack mitigations. The adoption rates on embedded devices are multiple times lower than their desktop counterparts. An equally important observation is that the situation is not improving over time. Without changing the current practices, the attack mitigations will remain missing, which may become a bigger threat in the upcoming IoT era. Throughout follow-up analyses, we further inferred a set of factors possibly contributing to the absence of attack mitigations. The exemplary ones include massive reuse of non-protected software, lateness in upgrading outdated kernels, and restrictions imposed by automated building tools. We envision these will turn into insights towards improving the adoption of attack mitigations on embedded devices in the future., Comment: To be published on NDSS 2022

Recently, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased significantly, as they have become affordable to most people. This spread has highlighted a critical security threat, namely the increasing number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. As these resource-constrained IoT devices are built to be cost-efficient, their security measures are limited. Moreover, most users are not aware of the security measures that they must apply. Nowadays, almost every IoT device (e.g., fridge, air conditioner, thermostat, toaster) is able to connect to the internet, and this allows the user to access and control it with its own smartphone application. The lack of security measures in these devices was highlighted in September 2016, when a large-scale DDoS attack was launched using a botnet of compromised IoT devices. This type of attack has been since used in different forms and has been classified as Mirai DDoS Botnet Attack. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Mirai attack and of the source code of the Mirai malware, reports on the implementation of the attack in a controlled environment, and proposes possible solutions that could help in mitigating the attack.

In this paper, we propose RECOUP, a reliable group communication routing protocol for IoT networks. RECOUP efficiently uses a low-overhead cluster-based multicast routing technique on top of the RPL protocol. RECOUP increases the probability of message delivery to the intended destination(s), irrespective of the network size and faults (such as broken links or non-responsive nodes), and in the presence of misbehaving nodes.We show that the cluster-based routing mechanism of RECOUP remains robust in presence of various topology (i.e., rank and sybil) and data communication (i.e., blackhole, wormhole, and jamming) attacks targeting the IoT networking infrastructure.An implementation of RECOUP is realized in Contiki. Our results show the effectiveness of RECOUP over state-of-art protocols concerning packet delivery ratio to 25%, end-to-end delay down to 100 ms, low radio transmissions required for per packet delivery to 6 mJ, and most importantly, it improves the robustness and scalability of data communication process in thewhole network., Comment: 14 Pages, 11 Figures