Ruotong Yu (Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Utah), Francesca Del Nin (University of Padua), Yuchen Zhang (Stevens Institute of Technology), Shan Huang (Stevens Institute of Technology), Pallavi Kaliyar (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Sarah Zakto (Cyber Independent Testing Lab), Mauro Conti (University of Padua, Delft University of Technology), Georgios Portokalidis (Stevens Institute of Technology), Jun Xu (Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Utah)

Embedded devices are ubiquitous. However, preliminary evidence shows that attack mitigations protecting our desktops/servers/phones are missing in embedded devices, posing a significant threat to embedded security. To this end, this paper presents an in-depth study on the adoption of common attack mitigations on embedded devices. Precisely, it measures the presence of standard mitigations against memory corruptions in over 10k Linux-based firmware of deployed embedded devices.

The study reveals that embedded devices largely omit both user-space and kernel-level attack mitigations. The adoption rates on embedded devices are multiple times lower than their desktop counterparts. An equally important observation is that the situation is not improving over time. Without changing the current practices, the attack mitigations will remain missing, which may become a bigger threat in the upcoming IoT era.

Throughout follow-up analyses, we further inferred a set of factors possibly contributing to the absence of attack mitigations. The exemplary ones include massive reuse of non-protected software, lateness in upgrading outdated kernels, and restrictions imposed by automated building tools. We envision these will turn into insights towards improving the adoption of attack mitigations on embedded devices in the future.

View More Papers

PASS: A System-Driven Evaluation Platform for Autonomous Driving Safety...

Zhisheng Hu (Baidu Security), Junjie Shen (UC Irvine), Shengjian Guo (Baidu Security), Xinyang Zhang (Baidu Security), Zhenyu Zhong (Baidu Security), Qi Alfred Chen (UC Irvine) and Kang Li (Baidu Security)

Read More

Demo #1: Security of Multi-Sensor Fusion based Perception in...

Yulong Cao (University of Michigan), Ningfei Wang (UC, Irvine), Chaowei Xiao (Arizona State University), Dawei Yang (University of Michigan), Jin Fang (Baidu Research), Ruigang Yang (University of Michigan), Qi Alfred Chen (UC, Irvine), Mingyan Liu (University of Michigan) and Bo Li (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Read More

WIP: Infrastructure-Aided Defense for Autonomous Driving Systems: Opportunities and...

Yunpeng Luo (UC Irvine), Ningfei Wang (UC Irvine), Bo Yu (PerceptIn), Shaoshan Liu (PerceptIn) and Qi Alfred Chen (UC Irvine)

Read More

Demo #8: Identifying Drones Based on Visual Tokens

Ben Nassi (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Elad Feldman (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Aviel Levy (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Yaron Pirutin (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Asaf Shabtai (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Ryusuke Masuoka (Fujitsu System Integration Laboratories) and Yuval Elovici (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Read More