Android apps for TP-Link, LIFX, Belkin, and Broadlink kit found with holes, some at least have been repaired
Updated Evaluating the security of IoT devices can be difficult, particularly if you’re not adept at firmware binary analysis. An alternative approach would be just to assume IoT security is generally terrible, and a new study has shown that’s probably a safe bet.
In a paper distributed last week through preprint service ArXiv, computer scientists Davino Mauro Junior, Luis Melo, Harvey Lu, Marcelo d’Amorim, and Atul Prakash from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, and the University of Michigan describe how they analyzed the security of apps accompanying IoT devices as indication of the overall security of the associated hardware.
« Our intuition is that if this interaction between the companion app and device firmware is not implemented with good security principles, the device’s firmware is potentially insecure and vulnerable to attacks, » they explain in their paper.
That intuition appears to be sound. The five researchers looked at the smartphone apps associated with 96 IoT devices and found almost 31 per cent use no encryption at all while 19 per cent rely on using hardcoded encryption keys that are easy to find.
This means about half of the apps (corresponding to 38 per cent of the devices) are potentially exploitable through protocol analysis. Because between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of the apps use local communication or local broadcast communication, there’s a potential attack path.
The researchers conducted a detailed study of four different smartphone apps associated with five devices – two devices used the same app – and created exploits for them.
