The Mirai botnet, composed primarily of embedded and IoT devices, took the Internet by storm in late 2016 when it overwhelmed several high-profile targets with massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In this paper, we provide a seven-month retrospective analysis of Mirai's growth to a peak of 600k infections and a history of its DDoS victims. By combining a variety of measurement perspectives, we analyze how the botnet emerged, what classes of devices were affected, and how Mirai variants evolved and competed for vulnerable hosts. Our measurements serve as a lens into the fragile ecosystem of IoT devices. We argue that Mirai may represent a sea change in the evolutionary development of botnets--the simplicity through which devices were infected and its precipitous growth, demonstrate that novice malicious techniques can compromise enough low-end devices to threaten even some of the best-defended targets. To address this risk, we recommend technical and nontechnical interventions, as well as propose future research directions.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-antonakakis.pdf

Understanding the mirai botnet

The industrial internet of things (IIoT): An analysis framework

The security issue impacting the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm has recently attracted significant attention from the research community. To this end, several surveys were put forward addressing various IoT-centric topics, including intrusion detection systems, threat modeling, and emerging technologies. In contrast, in this paper, we exclusively focus on the ever-evolving IoT vulnerabilities. In this context, we initially provide a comprehensive classification of state-of-the-art surveys, which address various dimensions of the IoT paradigm. This aims at facilitating IoT research endeavors by amalgamating, comparing, and contrasting dispersed research contributions. Subsequently, we provide a unique taxonomy, which sheds the light on IoT vulnerabilities, their attack vectors, impacts on numerous security objectives, attacks which exploit such vulnerabilities, corresponding remediation methodologies and currently offered operational cyber security capabilities to infer and monitor such weaknesses. This aims at providing the reader with a multidimensional research perspective related to IoT vulnerabilities, including their technical details and consequences, which is postulated to be leveraged for remediation objectives. Additionally, motivated by the lack of empirical (and malicious) data related to the IoT paradigm, this paper also presents a first look on Internet-scale IoT exploitations by drawing upon more than 1.2 GB of macroscopic, passive measurements’ data. This aims at practically highlighting the severity of the IoT problem, while providing operational situational awareness capabilities, which undoubtedly would aid in the mitigation task, at large. Insightful findings, inferences and outcomes in addition to open challenges and research problems are also disclosed in this paper, which we hope would pave the way for future research endeavors addressing theoretical and empirical aspects related to the imperative topic of IoT security.

Demystifying IoT Security: An Exhaustive Survey on IoT Vulnerabilities and a First Empirical Look on Internet-Scale IoT Exploitations

Security of smart manufacturing systems

The rapid developments of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart mobile devices in recent years have been dramatically incentivizing the advancement of edge computing. On the one hand, edge computing has provided a great assistance for lightweight devices to accomplish complicated tasks in an efficient way; on the other hand, its hasty development leads to the neglection of security threats to a large extent in edge computing platforms and their enabled applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the most influential and basic attacks as well as the corresponding defense mechanisms that have edge computing specific characteristics and can be practically applied to real-world edge computing systems. More specifically, we focus on the following four types of attacks that account for 82% of the edge computing attacks recently reported by Statista: distributed denial of service attacks, side-channel attacks, malware injection attacks, and authentication and authorization attacks. We also analyze the root causes of these attacks, present the status quo and grand challenges in edge computing security, and propose future research directions.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielaam/5/8789751/8741060-aam.pdf

Edge Computing Security: State of the Art and Challenges

Home-based IoT devices have a bleak reputation regarding their security practices. On the surface, the insecurities of IoT devices seem to be caused by integration problems that may be addressed by simple measures, but this work finds that to be a naive assumption. The truth is, IoT deployments, at their core, utilize traditional compute systems, such as embedded, mobile, and network. These components have many unexplored challenges such as the effect of over-privileged mobile applications on embedded devices. Our work proposes a methodology that researchers and practitioners could employ to analyze security properties for home-based IoT devices. We systematize the literature for home-based IoT using this methodology in order to understand attack techniques, mitigations, and stakeholders. Further, we evaluate \numDevices devices to augment the systematized literature in order to identify neglected research areas. To make this analysis transparent and easier to adapt by the community, we provide a public portal to share our evaluation data and invite the community to contribute their independent findings.

/pdf/sok-security-evaluation-of-home-based-iot-deployments-49uwn4n6w5.pdf

SoK: Security Evaluation of Home-Based IoT Deployments

Both the operational and academic security communities have used dynamic analysis sandboxes to execute malware samples for roughly a decade. Network information derived from dynamic analysis is frequently used for threat detection, network policy, and incident response. Despite these common and important use cases, the efficacy of the network detection signal derived from such analysis has yet to be studied in depth. This paper seeks to address this gap by analyzing the network communications of 26.8 million samples that were collected over a period of five years. Using several malware and network datasets, our large scale study makes three core contributions. (1) We show that dynamic analysis traces should be carefully curated and provide a rigorous methodology that analysts can use to remove potential noise from such traces. (2) We show that Internet miscreants are increasingly using potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that rely on a surprisingly stable DNS and IP infrastructure. This indicates that the security community is in need of better protections against such threats, and network policies may provide a solid foundation for such protections. (3) Finally, we see that, for the vast majority of malware samples, network traffic provides the earliest indicator of infection—several weeks and often months before the malware sample is discovered. Therefore, network defenders should rely on automated malware analysis to extract indicators of compromise and not to build early detection systems.

A Lustrum of Malware Network Communication: Evolution and Insights

Most modern cyber crime leverages the Domain Name System (DNS) to attain high levels of network agility and make detection of Internet abuse challenging. The majority of malware, which represent a key component of illicit Internet operations, are programmed to locate the IP address of their command-and-control (C&C) server through DNS lookups. To make the malicious infrastructure both agile and resilient, malware authors often use sophisticated communication methods that utilize DNS (i.e., domain generation algorithms) for their campaigns. In general, Internet miscreants make extensive use of short-lived disposable domains to promote a large variety of threats and support their criminal network operations.

Enabling Network Security Through Active DNS Datasets

Any individual that re-registers an expired domain implicitly inherits the residual trust associated with the domain's prior use. We find that adversaries can, and do, use malicious re-registration to exploit domain ownership changes -- undermining the security of both users and systems. In fact, we find that many seemingly disparate security problems share a root cause in residual domain trust abuse. With this study we shed light on the seemingly unnoticed problem of residual domain trust by measuring the scope and growth of this abuse over the past six years. During this time, we identified 27,758 domains from public blacklists and 238,279 domains resolved by malware that expired and then were maliciously re-registered. To help address this problem, we propose a technical remedy and discuss several policy remedies. For the former, we develop Alembic, a lightweight algorithm that uses only passive observations from the Domain Name System (DNS) to flag potential domain ownership changes. We identify several instances of residual trust abuse using this algorithm, including an expired APT domain that could be used to revive existing infections.

Chaz Lever

Papers

Understanding the mirai botnet

SoK: Security Evaluation of Home-Based IoT Deployments

A Lustrum of Malware Network Communication: Evolution and Insights

Enabling Network Security Through Active DNS Datasets

Domain-Z: 28 Registrations Later Measuring the Exploitation of Residual Trust in Domains