Abstract
Z-Wave smart home Internet of Things devices are used to save energy, increase comfort, and remotely monitor home activities. In the past, security researchers found Z-Wave device vulnerabilities through reverse engineering, manual audits, and penetration testing. However, they did not fully use fuzzing, which is an automated cost-effective testing technique. Thus, in this paper, we present VFUZZ, a protocol-aware blackbox fuzzing framework for quickly assessing vulnerabilities in Z-Wave devices. VFUZZ assesses the target device capabilities and encryption support to guide seed selection and tests the target for new vulnerability discovery. It uses our field prioritization algorithm (FIPA), which mutates specific Z-Wave frame fields to ensure the validity of the generated test cases. We assessed VFUZZ on a real Z-Wave network consisting of 19 Z-Wave devices ranging from legacy to recent ones, as well as different device types. Our VFUZZ evaluation found 10 distinct security vulnerabilities and seven crashes among the tested devices and yielded six unique common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) identifiers related to the Z-Wave chipset.
Highlights
The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is expected to increase exponentially every year [1]
The IoT smart home automation industry follows this trend; more than 100 million Z-Wave chipset modules have been sold to smart home service providers [2], owing to the fact that the Z-Wave wireless smart home protocol [3] is an appealing choice for several device manufacturers because of its simplicity of use, interoperability among different devices, power efficiency, backward compatibility with legacy devices [4], and use of a frequency range below 1 GHz that does not interfere with other common wireless protocols, e.g., Wi-Fi frequency band of 2.4 GHz
We evaluated the impact of VFuzz by fuzzing various
Summary
The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is expected to increase exponentially every year [1]. We present a brief overview of the Z-Wave protocol and its security features to better understand its functionality. Z-Wave [3] is a wireless home automation protocol developed in 2001 with an alliance of over 800 companies manufacturing over 3300 certified interoperable products worldwide [4]. A single Z-Wave home control network can have up to 232 smart devices interconnected in a mesh topology using the 908 MHz or 916 MHz frequency band for the US, the 868.40 MHz or 869.85 MHz frequency band for Europe, and other frequencies in other parts of the world [29]. Device identification and standardization are defined in several classes that specify roles and functionality to ensure interoperability between devices from different vendors in the Z-Wave home control network [30]. Starting in September 2020, the ZWave Alliance introduced a new Z-Wave Long Range (LR)
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