IoTSIT: A Static Instrumentation Tool for IoT Devices

Chen Chen,Zhe Jing,Jinxin Ma,Han Xu,Quanchen Zou,Baojiang Cui

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2991782

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been employed in various fields, which has caused an increased demand for IoT device testing and analysis. However, due to the strictly limited software interfaces and hardware resources of IoT devices, traditional instrumentation-based testing and analysis technologies cannot be effectively used in IoT devices. In this paper, to address the problems encountered in IoT device detection and analysis using instrumentation methods, we present a prototype novel instrumentation tool, IoTSIT, that is suitable for the static instrumentation of firmware in IoT devices. This tool forcibly writes instrumented code into files while leaving the original program logic intact. A comparison of IoTSIT with several other instrumentation tools confirms that IoTSIT offers advantages in terms of time efficiency and code expansion rate for firmware instrumentation.

Highlights

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is a system of interrelated computing devices that are provided with the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction
The functions of an IoT device must be tested in a real-world environment to find problems that may result when firmware is deployed on the device [2]
EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS The experiment is divided into four groups: the analysis of software expansion caused by instrumentation, time consumption by different types of instrumentation point triggering, time consumption by instrumentation with actual software, and impact of instrumentation on the performance of IoT devices firmware

Summary

Introduction

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is a system of interrelated computing devices that are provided with the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. IoT devices are increasingly employed in several fields, such as industries, national defense and medical treatments. A common view is that the number of IoT devices will reach 20 billion by 2020 [1]. Many IoT devices can interact with the external physical world. The functions of an IoT device must be tested in a real-world environment to find problems that may result when firmware is deployed on the device [2]. Because IoT devices interact with the external physical world, they present considerable security risks [3]–[5]

Methods

Results

Conclusion