Trend Micro Incorporated today warned organizations
to revisit their operational technology (OT) security after finding
major design flaws and vulnerable implementations related to two popular
machine-to-machine (M2M) protocols, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport
(MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Trend Micro's new
report, co-branded with Politecnico di Milano, The Fragility of Industrial IoT's Data Backbone, highlights the growing threat of industrial espionage, denial-of-service and targeted attacks by abusing these protocols.
Over
just a four-month period, Trend Micro researchers identified more than
200 million MQTT messages and more than 19 million CoAP messages being
leaked by exposed brokers and servers. Using simple keyword searches,
malicious attackers could locate this leaked production data,
identifying lucrative information on assets, personnel and technology
that can be abused for targeted attacks.
"The
issues we've uncovered in two of the most pervasive messaging protocols
used by IoT devices today should be cause for organizations to take a
serious, holistic look at the security of their OT environments," said
Greg Young, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro. "These
protocols weren't designed with security in mind, but are found in an
increasingly wide range of mission critical environments and use cases.
This represents a major cybersecurity risk. Hackers with even modest
resources could exploit these design flaws and vulnerabilities to
conduct reconnaissance, lateral movement, covert data theft and
denial-of-service attacks."
The
research shows how attackers could remotely control IoT endpoints or
deny service by leveraging security issues in the design, implementation
and deployment of devices using these protocols. Furthermore, by
abusing specific functionality in the protocols, hackers could maintain
persistent access to a target to move laterally across a network.
A few vulnerabilities were also identified through this research, which were disclosed through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI): CVE-2017-7653, CVE-2018-11615, and CVE-2018-17614. An example of the impact these vulnerabilities could have, CVE-2018-17614 is
an out-of-bounds write that could allow an attacker to execute
arbitrary code on vulnerable devices that implement an MQTT client.
While no new CoAP vulnerabilities were found, the report reinforces that
CoAP is User Datagram Protocol-based and follows a request-response
scheme, making it a good fit for amplification attacks.
To mitigate the risks highlighted in the research, Trend Micro encourages organizations to:
- Implement proper policies to remove unnecessary M2M services
- Run periodic checks using internet-wide scanning services to ensure sensitive data is not leaking through public IoT services
- Implement a vulnerability management workflow or other means to secure the supply chain
- Stay up to date with industry standards as this technology is evolving rapidly
To read the complete report, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/internet-of-things/mqtt-and-coap-security-and-privacy-issues-in-iot-and-iiot-communication-protocols