Biblio

The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard aims to reduce the attack surface for IoT devices by locking down their behavior to a formally-specified set of network flows (access control entries). Formal network behaviors can also be systematically and rigorously verified in any operating environment. Enforcing MUD flows and monitoring their activity in real-time can be relatively effective in securing IoT devices; however, its scope is limited to endpoints (domain names and IP addresses) and transport-layer protocols and services. Therefore, misconfigured or compromised IoTs may conform to their MUD-specified behavior but exchange unintended (or even malicious) contents across those flows. This paper develops PicP-MUD with the aim to profile the information content of packet payloads (whether unencrypted, encoded, or encrypted) in each MUD flow of an IoT device. That way, certain tasks like cyber-risk analysis, change detection, or selective deep packet inspection can be performed in a more systematic manner. Our contributions are twofold: (1) We analyze over 123K network flows of 6 transparent (e.g., HTTP), 11 encrypted (e.g., TLS), and 7 encoded (e.g., RTP) protocols, collected in our lab and obtained from public datasets, to identify 17 statistical features of their application payload, helping us distinguish different content types; and (2) We develop and evaluate PicP-MUD using a machine learning model, and show how we achieve an average accuracy of 99% in predicting the content type of a flow.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are increasing in frequency and volume on the Internet, and there is evidence that cyber-criminals are turning to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices such as cameras and vending machines as easy launchpads for large-scale attacks. This paper quantifies the capability of consumer IoT devices to participate in reflective DDoS attacks. We first show that household devices can be exposed to Internet reflection even if they are secured behind home gateways. We then evaluate eight household devices available on the market today, including lightbulbs, webcams, and printers, and experimentally profile their reflective capability, amplification factor, duration, and intensity rate for TCP, SNMP, and SSDP based attacks. Lastly, we demonstrate reflection attacks in a real-world setting involving three IoT-equipped smart-homes, emphasising the imminent need to address this problem before it becomes widespread.