Category: iot

VPNFilter IoT Router Malware

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Over 500k routers and gateways are estimated to be infected with malware dubbed VPNFilter, first reported in https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html .

It has 3 stages. In stage 1 it adds itself to crontab to remain after a reboot. In stage 2 it adds a plugin architecture. In stage 3 it adds modules which instruct it to do specific things.  A factory reset and router restart in protected network was recommended to remove it. Disabling remote administration and changing passwords is recommended to prevent reinfection.

The 3rd stage module modifies IPtables rules, enabling mitm attacks and javascript injection.

“The first action taken by the ssler module is to configure the device’s iptables to redirect all traffic destined for port 80 to its local service listening on port 8888. It starts by using the insmod command to insert three iptables modules into the kernel (ip_tables.ko, iptable_filter.ko, iptable_nat.ko) and then executes the following shell commands:

  • iptables -I INPUT -p tcp –dport 8888 -j ACCEPT
  • iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp –dport 80 -j REDIRECT –to-port 8888
  • Example: ./ssler logs src:192.168.201.0/24 dst:10.0.0.0/16

-A PREROUTING -s 192.168.201.0/24 -d 10.0.0.0/16 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 80 -j REDIRECT –to-ports 8888

To ensure that these rules do not get removed, ssler deletes them and then adds them back approximately every four minutes.“

More behaviors of the malware are described at https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2018/05/27/vpnfilter-botnet-a-sophoslabs-analysis-part-2/ including photobucket request, fake CA certs claiming Microsoft issued them and ipify lookups.

YARA rules for detection –

https://github.com/Neo23x0/signature-base/blob/master/yara/apt_vpnfilter.yar

https://github.com/Neo23x0/sigma/blob/master/rules/proxy/proxy_ua_apt.yml#L33

YARA (yet another recursive acronym) is a format to specify rules match malware based on string patterns, regular expressions and their frequency of occurrence. A guide to writing effective ones is here.

User-Agent rule –


alert http any any -> any any (msg:"VPNFilter malware User-Agent"; content:"Mozilla/6.1 (compatible|3B| MSIE 9.0|3B| Windows NT 5.3|3B| Trident/5.0)"; http_user_agent; sid:2; rev:1;)

view raw

vpnfilter-ua.rule

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Ipify self-ip address querying service, with json output. http://api.ipify.org/

 

Weeping Angel Remote Camera Monitor

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Sales of hardware camera blockers and similar devices should increase, with the Weeping Angel disclosure. Wikileaks detailed how the CIA and MI5 hacked Samsung TVs to silently monitor remote communications. Interesting to read for the level of technical detail: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/EXTENDING_User_Guide/EXTENDING_User_Guide.pdf . The attack was called ‘Weeping Angel’, a term borrowed from Doctor Who.

Other such schemes are described at https://wikileaks.org/vault7/releases/#Weeping%20Angel , including a iPhone implant to get data from your phone – https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/NightSkies_v1_2_User_Guide/NightSkies_v1_2_User_Guide.pdf .

IOT security vulnerabilities and hacks

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Mirror of https://github.com/nebgnahz/awesome-iot-hacks :

A curated list of hacks in IoT space so that researchers and industrial products can address the security vulnerabilities (hopefully).

Thingbots

RFID

Home Automation

Connected Doorbell

Hub

Smart Coffee

Wearable

Smart Plug

Cameras

Traffic Lights

Automobiles

Airplanes

Light Bulbs

Locks

Smart Scale

Smart Meters

Pacemaker

Thermostats

Fridge

Media Player & TV

Toilet

Toys

Lessons from SF Muni Ransomware – malware

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On Nov 25, a hacker going by “andy saolis” infected the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SMFTA) network with ransomware that encrypted data on 900 office computers, spreading through the system’s Windows operating system. Saolis threatened to publish 30 gigabytes of data, including contracts, employee data, customer information.  SMFTA’s ticketing system was shut down to prevent the malware from spreading. The attacker demanded a 100 Bitcoin ransom, around $73,000, to unlock the affected files. Salted hash reported the malware is likely a variant of HDDCryptor, which uses commercial tools to encrypt hard drives and network shares.

The service was restored due to backups . However consider these systems were in an ICS scenario. An unexpected downtime would result, which would be unacceptable.

The Dyn DNS DDOS Attack Oct 21

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DYN is a DNS provider internet infrastructure company. It’s the name behind widely used DynDNS. It supports DNS for twitter, visa, github, mongo, netflix and several other big tech sites.

Doug Madory a researcher at DYN, presented a talk  on DDoS attacks in Dallas at a meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) 68 – his was the last talk on Oct 19, wednesday. The talk discussed the attack on Krebs on Security last month and details other such attacks.

On Friday several sites serviced by DYN were attacked in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack involved malicious DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses including a botnet on a large number of IoT devices infected with the Mirai malware, which is designed to brute force security on any IoT device. There are cameras involved with fixed passwords that are burned into the firmware, that cannot be changed.

The implications of IoT devices that are 1) unsecure 2) impossible to secure and 3) infected by malware and 4) controlled by a botnet that is controlled by malicious intent are made clearer with this attack.

Update on DDOS mitigation:  RFC 3882,  Configuring BGP to block Denial-of-Service attacks, discusses Remote Triggered Black Hole (RTBH) method, to configure certain routers to selectively stop malicious high volume traffic which is targeting a particular IP.  The target site is made inaccessible but the rest of the network service stays active. An example configuration is at https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/10857/use-bgp-to-defend-against-a-ddos-attack-originating-from-remote-as .  The improvement is to reduce the side-effects of such a delisting, to enable faster recovery when the attack is over.

 

Cassandra and the Internet of Boilers

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A fascinating story about use of Cassandra for analyzing sensor data from boilers to predict their failuresin UK homes by British Gas appeared here.

The design of Cassandra is intuitively clear to me in its use of a single primary index to distribute the query load among a set of nodes that can be scaled up linearly. It uses a ring architecture based on consistent hashing. It emphasizes Availability and Partition-Tolerance over Consistency in the CAP theorom.

The data structure is a two level hash table, with the first level key being the row key, and the second level key being the column key.

Where Cassandra differs from a SQL db is in the flexibility of the data model. In SQL one can model complex relationships, which allow for complex queries using joins to be done. Cassandra has support for CQL (Cassandra Query Language) which is like SQL but does not support joins or transactions.  The impact is that the queries with CQL cannot be as flexible (or adhoc) as those for SQL. The kind of queries that can be done have to be planned in advance. Doing other queries would be inefficient. However this drawback is mitigated by use of Spark along with Cassandra. In my understanding the Spark cluster is run in a parallel Cassandra cluster.

Why are joins important ? It goes back to relationships in an E-R diagram. Can’t we just model entities ? When we store Employees in one table and Departments in another in a SQL db, each row has an id which is a shorthand for the employee or the department. This simplification forces us to look up both tables again via a join in a query – say when asking for all employees belong to (only) the finance department. But tables like departments may be small in size so they could be replicated in memory for quickly recovering associations. And tables like employees can be naturally partitioned by the employee id which is unique. This means that SQL and complex relationships may not be needed for number of use cases. If ACID compliance is also not a requirement, then nosql is a good bet. Cassandra differs from MongoDB in that it can scale much better.

Quote from British Gas: “We’re dealing largely with time series data, and Spark is 10 to 100 times quicker as it is operating on data in-memory…Cassandra delivers what we need today and if you look at the Internet of Things space; that is what is really useful right now.”

Here’s a blog that triggered this thought along with a talk by Rachel@datastax, who also assured me that Cassandra has been hardened for security and has Kerberos support in the free version.

British Gas operates Hive, a competitor to Nest for thermostats. Note that couple months back British Gas reported 2200 of its accounts were compromised.

CERT Warns Wind Turbines Open to Compromise

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Cert issued a warning that certain wind turbines are open to compromise.

“A successful attack would allow the malicious actor to lock out a legitimate administrator and take control of the device. .. the vulnerability is easy to exploit by an attacker who does not need to be authenticated to the device, or have direct physical access to it.”

A fix is issued but no OTA updates supported .. imagine climbing each turbine to upgrade the software.

Couple days earlier CERT issued an advisory about gas detectors being compromised. Incorrect gas level reports could be hazardous to equipment and human life.

DARPA asked for proposals around automatic detection and patching of security vulnerabilities.  In addition it raised an alert abut power grid vulnerability and proposed a plan to recover from a massive power grid attack. The power grid has faced hundreds of attacks, partly because it relies on 1970s era technology which cannot be upgraded as service cannot be interrupted. The addition of SmartMeters which make it more connected can increase the vulnerability level.

How does IOT affect Identity and Access Management ? 

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For the purpose of the IOT, an individual device can be abstracted as a specialized service which produces and consumes data. In addition, the device has certain capabilities to act on, or transform data on a discrete or continuous basis.

Who should have access to these services and capabilities ? It could be

  • other devices in proximity to the device
  • external services
  • certain users

Who gets access is a function of the identity of the devices, the identities of the entities accessing the service and policies governing access (which can include parameters such as location, time, role or more complex rules).

To determine access, a device should be capable of

  • identifying itself , its services and capabilities
  • obtaining authorization for the services and capabilities (before exercising them), and presenting these when requested. This authorization includes a signed access policy
  • updating or invalidating the access policy as time goes on

The access policies need to be applied to the data flows based on the identities and be rich enough to capture use cases of interest.

Identity of ‘Things’ in IOT

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What’s the identity of the device ? There can be multiple identities based on whether the device is identifying itself to a user, to another device of the same type, or to other devices in the ecosystem that it is a part of (say a component of a car).

Having a unique device id and leveraging it for the services that are built on the device is a design choice. Consider the choices for iPhone and Android. In the iPhone the device id permeates the application layer; the application developer and can target his application for specific devices and must register the device for developing on it. This design choice allows the device to check the applications that are run on it are valid and their associated developer is registered with Apple. It strengthens the associations in the ecosystem of devices, developers, applications and users.

In Android the security certificates were at the JVM layer which allows self-signed certificates. Here the device id is not used as a strong identifier that is known to applications and developers. This is one reason the open system is more prone to malware.

A unique hardware identity is something to look for in IOT designs. Here’s an article from Intel/McAfee discussing EPID an immutable device ID that can be used for identifying and also anonymizing. https://blogs.mcafee.com/business/intels-iot-gateway-enhancements/

Update: On Nov 25, news came of a number of IOT devices using the same HTTPS certificate and SSH keys. See here. Large clusters of devices on the net are exposed on the internet this way.

ThingWorx IOT Platform and Marketplace

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The premise behind ThingWorx is that manufactured products are transforming into services. A product can be remotely monitored, maintained, and its data analyzed as part of the extended service wrapper. It is an interesting point of view on the evolution of products.

GE provides the engine not as a product but as a service, it continues to maintain it after the sale. Boeing provides the plane as a service, it continues to maintain it after the sale.

ThingWorkx claims to makes it easier for any product to be converted to such a service. It’s not clear how this works with legacy systems – whether it is an agent or a wrapper and how easy it is to add. Its security whitepaper discusses authentication, authorization, encryption, security models, audit etc.

Imagine a hyperconnected supply chain consisting of components that are tracked back by their supplier. Security and access controls would be a challenge in such a dynamic environment.

An example of a product/application on ThingWorx is Velio OBD device and Velio Webhook application.  The Webhook application displays basic data coming from OBD modules: GPS, accelerometer and OBD-II. It enables users to create customized views depicting the data that is important to them while also enabling access to both live and historical data. The application will be available in the ThingWorx Marketplace.

Some competitors include  Spark Devices, Ayla Networks, Carriots, Xively, Axeda, Arrayent and Berg Cloud.

RSA World 2015 San Francisco Internet of Things

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Several interesting companies I talked to in the mobile and enterprise space

  • BlueBox Security – automatic containerization of mobile apps
  • SkyCure – identified some DoS attacks that can occur against iOS devices
  • Okta – allows integrations with some 4000 different applications from a single identity console.
  • BlueCoat Systems – network traffic analysis for malware detection
  • Microsoft – integration of admin and user policies for Office365 with Email.
  • Shape Security – changes the shape of the traffic by detecting the large fraction of traffic that is not coming from real users and blocking it from hitting the webservers
  • German pavilion with several technologies including database encryption and controls

On the IOT side of things there were hacking demos of Nest thermostats, Vera home automation systems, remotely connected storage devices. Read more about the “Internet of Crappy Things” at the Kaspersky blog – https://blog.kaspersky.com/internet-of-crappy-things-2/8518/