Large-Scale Security Analysis of Real-World Backend Deployments Speaking IoT-Focused Protocols
<|reference_start|>Large-Scale Security Analysis of Real-World Backend Deployments Speaking IoT-Focused Protocols: Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, ranging from smart home assistants to health devices, are pervasive: Forecasts estimate their number to reach 29 billion by 2030. Understanding the security of their machine-to-machine communication is crucial. Prior work focused on identifying devices' vulnerabilities or proposed protocol-specific solutions. Instead, we investigate the security of backends speaking IoT protocols, that is, the backbone of the IoT ecosystem.   We focus on three real-world protocols for our large-scale analysis: MQTT, CoAP, and XMPP. We gather a dataset of over 337,000 backends, augment it with geographical and provider data, and perform non-invasive active measurements to investigate three major security threats: information leakage, weak authentication, and denial of service. Our results provide quantitative evidence of a problematic immaturity in the IoT ecosystem. Among other issues, we find that 9.44% backends expose information, 30.38% CoAP-speaking backends are vulnerable to denial of service attacks, and 99.84% of MQTT- and XMPP-speaking backends use insecure transport protocols (only 0.16% adopt TLS, of which 70.93% adopt a vulnerable version).<|reference_end|>
@article{tagliaro2024large-scale,
    title={Large-Scale Security Analysis of Real-World Backend Deployments Speaking
  IoT-Focused Protocols},
    author={Carlotta Tagliaro and Martina Komsic and Andrea Continella and Kevin
  Borgolte and Martina Lindorfer},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.09662},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1145/3678890.3678899},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.09662},
    primaryClass={cs.CR cs.NI}
}