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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2212.13716 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 Dec 2022 (v1), last revised 29 Dec 2022 (this version, v2)]

Title:One Bad Apple Spoils the Barrel: Understanding the Security Risks Introduced by Third-Party Components in IoT Firmware

Authors:Binbin Zhao, Shouling Ji, Jiacheng Xu, Yuan Tian, Qiuyang Wei, Qinying Wang, Chenyang Lyu, Xuhong Zhang, Changting Lin, Jingzheng Wu, Raheem Beyah
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Abstract:Currently, the development of IoT firmware heavily depends on third-party components (TPCs) to improve development efficiency. Nevertheless, TPCs are not secure, and the vulnerabilities in TPCs will influence the security of IoT firmware. Existing works pay less attention to the vulnerabilities caused by TPCs, and we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the security impact of TPC vulnerability against firmware. To fill in the knowledge gap, we design and implement FirmSec, which leverages syntactical features and control-flow graph features to detect the TPCs in firmware, and then recognizes the corresponding vulnerabilities. Based on FirmSec, we present the first large-scale analysis of the security risks raised by TPCs on $34,136$ firmware images. We successfully detect 584 TPCs and identify 128,757 vulnerabilities caused by 429 CVEs. Our in-depth analysis reveals the diversity of security risks in firmware and discovers some well-known vulnerabilities are still rooted in firmware. Besides, we explore the geographical distribution of vulnerable devices and confirm that the security situation of devices in different regions varies. Our analysis also indicates that vulnerabilities caused by TPCs in firmware keep growing with the boom of the IoT ecosystem. Further analysis shows 2,478 commercial firmware images have potentially violated GPL/AGPL licensing terms.
Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as: arXiv:2212.13716 [cs.CR]
  (or arXiv:2212.13716v2 [cs.CR] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.13716

Submission history

From: Binbin Zhao [view email]
[v1] Wed, 28 Dec 2022 06:41:20 UTC (6,178 KB)
[v2] Thu, 29 Dec 2022 02:03:03 UTC (6,178 KB)
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