Understanding IoT Security from a Market-Scale Perspective

Abstract

Consumer IoT products and services are ubiquitous; yet, a proper characterization of consumer IoT security is infeasible without an understanding of what IoT products are on the market, i.e., without a market-scale perspective. This paper seeks to close this gap by developing the IoTSpotter framework, which automatically constructs a market-scale snapshot of mobile-IoT apps, i.e., mobile apps that are used as companions or automation providers to IoT devices. IoTSpotter also extracts artifacts that allow us to examine the security of this snapshot in the IoT context (e.g., devices supported by apps, IoT-specific libraries). Using IoTSpotter, we identify 37,783 mobile-IoT apps from Google Play, the largest set of mobile-IoT apps so far, and uncover 7 key results in the process (1-7). We leverage this dataset to perform three key security analyses that lead to 10 impactful security findings (F1-F10) that demonstrate the current state of mobile-IoT apps. Our analysis uncovers severe cryptographic violations in 94.11% (863/917) mobile-IoT apps with >1 million installs each, 65 vulnerable IoT-specific libraries affected by 79 unique CVEs, and used by 40 popular apps, and 7,887 apps that is affected by the Janus vulnerability. Finally, a case study with 18 popular mobile-IoT apps uncovers the critical impact of the vulnerabilities in them on important IoT artifacts and functions, motivating the development of mobile security analysis contextualized to IoT.