Watching the Weak Link into Your Home: An Inspection and Monitoring Toolkit for TR-069
This addresses security vulnerabilities in TR-069, affecting billions of devices and their users, by providing tools for inspection and monitoring, though it is incremental as it builds on existing standards analysis.
The paper tackled the lack of research on security and privacy in the TR-069 standard, used for remote device management, by inspecting communication and finding that most providers do not use recommended security measures like TLS, and that insecure authentication methods expose user credentials. It also developed a monitoring toolkit and found that providers' firmware update processes are lacking, failing to realize security benefits.
TR-069 is a standard for the remote management of end-user devices by service providers. Despite being implemented in nearly a billion devices, almost no research has been published on the security and privacy aspects of TR-069. The first contribution of this paper is a study of the TR-069 ecosystem and techniques to inspect TR-069 communication. We find that the majority of analyzed providers do not use recommended security measures, such as TLS. Second, we present a TR-069 honeyclient to both analyze TR-069 behavior of providers and test configuration servers for security vulnerabilities. We find that popular open-source configuration servers use insecure methods to authenticate clients. TR-069 implementations based on these servers expose, for instance, their users' internet telephony credentials. Third, we develop components for a distributed system to continuously monitor activities in providers' TR-069 deployments. Our setup consists of inexpensive hardware sensors deployed on customer premises and centralized log collectors. We perform real-world measurements and find that the purported security benefits of TR-069 are not realized as providers' firmware update processes are lacking.