Trampoline Over the Air: Breaking in IoT Devices Through MQTT Brokers

• Published in: 2022 IEEE 7th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P) pp. 171 - 187
• Main Authors: Xu, Huikai, Yu, Miao, Wang, Yanhao, Liu, Yue, Hou, Qinsheng, Ma, Zhenbang, Duan, Haixin, Zhuge, Jianwei, Liu, Baojun
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-06-2022
• Subjects: Data transfer; Denial-of-service attack; Ethics; Fuzzing; Internet of Things; IoT; MQTT; Performance evaluation; Transportation
• DOI: 10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00019

MQTT is widely adopted by IoT devices because it allows for the most efficient data transfer over a variety of communication lines. The security of MQTT has received increasing attention in recent years, and several studies have demonstrated the configurations of many MQTT brokers are insecure. Adversaries are allowed to exploit vulnerable brokers and publish malicious messages to subscribers. However, little has been done to understanding the security issues on the device side when devices handle unauthorized MQTT messages. To fill this research gap, we propose a fuzzing framework named ShadowFuzzer to find client-side vulnerabilities when processing incoming MQTT messages. To avoiding ethical issues, ShadowFuzzer redirects traffic destined for the actual broker to a shadow broker under the control to monitor vulnerabilities. We select 15 IoT devices communicating with vulnerable brokers and leverage ShadowFuzzer to find vulnerabilities when they parse MQTT messages. For these devices, ShadowFuzzer reports 34 zero-day vulnerabilities in 11 devices. We evaluated the exploitability of these vulnerabilities and received a total of 44,000 USD bug bounty rewards. And 16 CVE/CNVD/CN-NVD numbers have been assigned to us.