Abstract
Recently, high-speed IPv4 scanners, such as ZMap, have enabled rapid and timely collection of TLS certificates and other security-sensitive parameters. Such large datasets led to the development of the Censys search interface, facilitating comprehensive analysis of TLS deployments in the wild. Several recent studies analyzed TLS certificates as deployed in web servers. Beyond public web servers, TLS is deployed in many other Internet-connected devices, at home and enterprise environments, and at network backbones. In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary analysis using Censys on TLS deployments in such devices (e.g., routers, modems, NAS, printers, SCADA, and IoT devices in general). We compare certificates and TLS connection parameters from a security perspective, as found in common devices with Alexa 1M sites. Our results highlight significant weaknesses, and may serve as a catalyst to improve TLS security for these devices.
An extended version of this paper is available as a technical report [27], which additionally includes: analysis of certificate issuers, certificate reuse, DH prime number reuse, stronger cipher suites, and device type ranking.
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Acknowledgements
We thank anonymous FC 2017 and IMC 2016 reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, and Zakir Durumeric for helping us with Censys. We also appreciate the feedback we received from the members of Concordia’s Madiba Security Research Group, especially, Xavier de Carné de Carnavalet. The second author is supported in part by an NSERC Discovery Grant.
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Samarasinghe, N., Mannan, M. (2017). Short Paper: TLS Ecosystems in Networked Devices vs. Web Servers. In: Kiayias, A. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10322. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_30
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