Research Article
Breaking Embedded Software Homogeneity with Protocol Mutations
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_40, author={Tongwei Ren and Ryan Williams and Sirshendu Ganguly and Lorenzo De Carli and Long Lu}, title={Breaking Embedded Software Homogeneity with Protocol Mutations}, proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 18th EAI International Conference, SecureComm 2022, Virtual Event, October 2022, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM}, year={2023}, month={2}, keywords={Software diversity Protocol mutations MTD}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_40} }- Tongwei Ren
Ryan Williams
Sirshendu Ganguly
Lorenzo De Carli
Long Lu
Year: 2023
Breaking Embedded Software Homogeneity with Protocol Mutations
SECURECOMM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-25538-0_40
Abstract
Network-connected embedded devices suffer from easy-to-exploit security issues. Due to code and platform reuse the same vulnerability oftentimes ends up affecting a large installed base. These circumstances enable destructive types of attacks, like ones in which compromised devices disrupt the power grid.
We tackle an enabling factors of these attacks: software homogeneity. We propose techniques to inject syntax mutations in application-level network protocols used in the embedded/IoT space. Our approach makes it easy to diversify a protocol into syntactically different dialects, at the granularity of individual deployments. This form of moving-target defense disrupts batch compromise of devices, preventing reusable network exploits. Our approach identifies candidate program data structures and functions via a set of heuristics, mutate them via static transformations, and selects correctness-preserving mutations using dynamic testing.
Evaluation on 4 popular protocols shows that we mitigate known exploitable vulnerabilities, while introducing no bugs.
