Discovering Vulnerabilities in COTS IoT Devices through Blackbox Fuzzing Web Management Interface

Jingwei Li,Ting Chen,Dong Wang,Xiaosong Zhang

doi:10.1155/2019/5076324

Abstract

A novel approach for discovering vulnerability in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) IoT devices is proposed in this paper, which will revolutionize the area. Unlike previous work, the web management interface in IoT was used to detect vulnerabilities by leveraging fuzzing technology. To validate and evaluate this scheme, a tool named WMIFuzzer was designed and implemented. There were also two challenges: (1) due to the diversity of web interface implementations, there were no existing seed messages for fuzzing this interface and it was inefficient while taking random messages to launch the fuzzing and (2) because of the highly structured seed message, fuzzing with byte-level mutation could conduce to be rejected by the device at an early stage. To address these challenges, a brute-force UI automation was designed to drive the web interface to generate initial seed messages automatically, as well as a weighted message parse tree (WMPT) was proposed to guide the mutation to generate mostly structure-valid messages. The extensive experimental results show that WMIFuzzer could achieve expected result while 10 vulnerabilities including 6 zero-days in 7 COTS IoT devices were discovered.

Highlights

With the rapid progress of Internet of things (IoT) technologies, more and more devices have been deployed in our daily lives, such as smart home routers and IP cameras
In a typical IoT environment, several devices are deployed for different purposes. ere are two types of IoTnodes: a gateway node and multiple sensor nodes
While some cannot access the Internet directly, such as the wristband connected to a mobile phone via Bluetooth and the light connected to a hub via Zigbee. e mobile phone and the Zigbee hub can make a connection with remote user via Internet, and both of them contain a proxy module that works as a bridge between the Bluetooth (Zigbee) and the Internet. e gateway node, which is usually a wireless home router, provides the access point of Internet. e camera, mobile phone, and Zigbee hub are connected to this node

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid progress of Internet of things (IoT) technologies, more and more devices have been deployed in our daily lives, such as smart home routers and IP cameras. Some sensor nodes are coupled with Internet capability, such as the camera connected to the homeGate via WiFi. While some cannot access the Internet directly, such as the wristband connected to a mobile phone via Bluetooth and the light connected to a hub via Zigbee. While some cannot access the Internet directly, such as the wristband connected to a mobile phone via Bluetooth and the light connected to a hub via Zigbee. E camera, mobile phone, and Zigbee hub are connected to this node It plays an important role since the insider and outsider of the whole home network are separated by this gateway node

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