Black Hat Europe Brings A Bevy of IoT Security Insights

As the year winds down around us, people around the world are spending more time at home, visiting friends and family. Many of those homes are filled with vulnerable smart devices connected to the Internet of Things, and at Black Hat Europe in London next month you’ll have a prime opportunity to learn about the latest IoT security tricks and techniques.

This year the list of Internet of Things Briefings at Black Hat Europe is packed with practical content like BlueMaster: Bypassing and Fixing Bluetooth-based Proximity Authentication, a Briefing all about the security pitfalls of Bluetooth-based proximity authentication. You’ll hear researchers analyze implementations of Android Smart Lock and Windows Dynamic Lock and demonstrate new attacks on these implementations. Based on their analysis, expect to walk away with a better understanding of the weaknesses in these systems, as well as three new attacks that allow attackers to bypass device proximity authentication.

Experts from Panasonic will present a few Briefings, including Understanding the IoT Threat Landscape and a Home Appliance Manufacturer's Approach to Counter Threats to IoT. As a device manufacturer, Panasonic collected information on IoT threats by connecting its own devices in the development / pre-shipment phases to its own honeypot.

Since its deployment, Panasonic has been able to find 179 million attack cases and 25 thousand malware samples, of which 4,800 were unique samples targeting IoT. You’re going to learn all about it (including insights on some interesting 0-day attacks against the SMB protocol) in this Black Hat Europe Briefing.

For information on how to deal with IoT threats at scale, check out OEM Finder: Hunting Vulnerable OEM IoT Devices at Scale. Researchers developed this new tool to help raise awareness about the threat that vulnerabilities in OEM hardware pose to customers who buy (rebranded) hardware from other companies. OEM Finder can automatically detect OEM device candidates based on the similarity of its appearance between the OEM and original device. In this Briefing you’ll learn how the team achieved fast, automatic and precise OEM device detection by adopting an object recognition algorithm (KAZE) with k-NN. You’ll also learn how to use it effectively to safeguard your devices and those of your clients

Get more information on these and lots of other cutting-edge content in the Briefings schedule for Black Hat Europe, which returns to The Excel in London December 2-5, 2019. For more information on what’s happening at the event and how to register, check out the Black Hat website.