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Analysing the Resilience of the Internet of Things Against Physical and Proximity Attacks

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Security, Privacy, and Anonymity in Computation, Communication, and Storage (SpaCCS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10658))

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is being widely integrated in many areas like smart-homes, smart-cities, healthcare, and critical infrastructures. As shown by some recent incidents, like the Mirai and BrickerBot botnets, security is a key issue for current and future IoT systems. In this paper, we examine the security of different categories of IoT devices to understand their resilience under different security conditions for attackers. In particular, we analyse IoT robustness against attacks performed under two threat models, namely (i) physical access of the attacker, (ii) close proximity of the attacker (i.e., RFID and WiFi ranges). We discuss the results of the tests we performed on different categories of IoT devices, namely IP cameras, OFo bike locks, RFID-based smart-locks, and smart-home WiFi routers. The results show that most of IoT devices do not address basic vulnerabilities, which can be exploitable under different threat models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://jia.360.cn/.

  2. 2.

    We assume the SIM card is not locked, as over %60 people do not use the SIM lock functionality to restrict removing the SIM to another phone [14].

  3. 3.

    http://www.ofo.so/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.fastcom.com.cn/.

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  3. BrickerBot, the permanent denial-of-service Botnet, is back with a vengeance, April 2017. https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/brickerbot-the-permanent-denial-of-service-botnet-is-back-with-a-vengeance/

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Acknowledgments

This work is financially supported by Jiangsu Government Scholarship for Overseas Studies, the National Natural Science Foundation of P. R. China (Nos. 61373017, 61572260, 61572261, 61672296, 61602261), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Nos. BK20140886, BK20140888), Scientific and Technological Support Project of Jiangsu Province (Nos. BE2015702, BE2016185, BE2016777), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2014M551636, 2014M561696), Jiangsu Planned Projects for Postdoctoral Research Funds (Nos.1302090B, 1401005B), Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX17_0798).

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Correspondence to Daniele Sgandurra .

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Xu, H., Sgandurra, D., Mayes, K., Li, P., Wang, R. (2017). Analysing the Resilience of the Internet of Things Against Physical and Proximity Attacks. In: Wang, G., Atiquzzaman, M., Yan, Z., Choo, KK. (eds) Security, Privacy, and Anonymity in Computation, Communication, and Storage. SpaCCS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10658. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72395-2_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72395-2_27

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