Finding Security Vulnerabilities in IoT Cryptographic Protocol and Concurrent Implementations
This addresses security and privacy issues in IoT devices by improving verification of cryptographic protocols, though it is incremental as it builds on existing BMC and fuzzing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of security vulnerabilities in IoT cryptographic protocols and concurrent implementations by proposing a new verification approach called EBF, which combines Bounded Model Checking and Fuzzing to detect issues like data races and memory safety, showing it outperforms state-of-the-art tools in bug finding and detects bugs in benchmarks like WolfMQTT and OpenSSL.
Internet of Things (IoT) consists of a large number of devices connected through a network, which exchange a high volume of data, thereby posing new security, privacy, and trust issues. One way to address these issues is ensuring data confidentiality using lightweight encryption algorithms for IoT protocols. However, the design and implementation of such protocols is an error-prone task; flaws in the implementation can lead to devastating security vulnerabilities. Here we propose a new verification approach named Encryption-BMC and Fuzzing (EBF), which combines Bounded Model Checking (BMC) and Fuzzing techniques to check for security vulnerabilities that arise from concurrent implementations of cyrptographic protocols, which include data race, thread leak, arithmetic overflow, and memory safety. EBF models IoT protocols as a client and server using POSIX threads, thereby simulating both entities' communication. It also employs static and dynamic verification to cover the system's state-space exhaustively. We evaluate EBF against three benchmarks. First, we use the concurrency benchmark from SV-COMP and show that it outperforms other state-of-the-art tools such as ESBMC, AFL, Lazy-CSeq, and TSAN with respect to bug finding. Second, we evaluate an open-source implementation called WolfMQTT. It is an MQTT client implementation that uses the WolfSSL library. We show that \tool detects a data race bug, which other approaches are unable to find. Third, to show the effectiveness of EBF, we replicate some known vulnerabilities in OpenSSL and CyaSSL (lately WolfSSL) libraries. EBF can detect the bugs in minimum time.