Black Hat Asia Offers New IoT Security Tools & Tricks

The so-called “Internet of Things” grows larger and more complicated every day, and cybersecurity professionals need to stay on top of it.

That’s tricky business now that so many devices are capable of processing and exchanging data, but Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore in March with a smorgasbord of practical Briefings and demos aimed at helping you become an IoT master.

With the leak of Mirai botnet source code back in 2016, countless IoT botnet variants have emerged and evolved as part of a larger trend. Get an inside look at how they work and what they’re up to in “Pwning the Core of IoT Botnets: From a Honeypot to Gigabytes of Botnet Source Code”, a 50-minute Briefing in which you’ll see how even a single honeypot can lead to the discovery of gigabytes of botnet source code, uncovering various dramatic scenes among the bot herders behind the curtain.

In “Dive into VxWorks Based IoT Device: Debug the Undebugable Device” an expert will show at how to debug VxWorks, that popular IoT operating system that can be challenging to test and fix since it’s often running on devices without debuggers. This 50-minute Briefing aims to demonstrate how to find vulnerabilities in VxWorks devices via techniques like fuzzing, and debug VxWorks-based IoT devices without built-in debuggers.

You’ll also want to swing by the Arsenal at Black Hat Asia to check out demos of some of the new open-source tools designed specifically for IoT work For example, capable folks love the notion of a good Swiss army knife, and that’s exactly what “MQTT-PWN: Your IoT Swiss-Army Knife” offers. MQTT is a machine-to-machine connectivity protocol designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport, one widely used by millions of IoT devices worldwide. MQTT-PWN intends to be a one-stop-shop for IoT broker penetration-testing and security assessment operations. It combines enumeration, supportive functions and exploitation modules while packing it all within command-line-interface with an easy-to-use and extensible shell-like environment. A full circle scenario of attacks will be demonstrated for you that you won’t want to miss!

“Cotopaxi: IoT Protocols Security Testing Toolkit” will also be in the Arsenal this year, and this highly useful toolkit for testing and securing IoT devices is worth checking out since new IoT protocols are being widely used in both public networks and industrial environments. Unfortunately, in most cases those servers are not configured properly or use outdated components. The Cotopaxi toolkit is designed specifically to help ferret out those weak points, using new IoT protocols like CoAP, mDNS, and HTCPCP. Check it out!

And make sure to catch a demo of “IoT Hunter: A Framework Tool for Building IoT Threat Intelligence System,” a tool from the Tencent Antivirus Lab that contains all important modules for IOT threat analysis, including information collection, data extraction, threat data analysis, and intelligence visualization.

IoT Hunter can provide (but isn’t limited to) static information extraction, dynamic operation information extraction, and third-party network platform information. It’s designed to help security researchers quickly and easily build their own IOT intelligence platform for IOT malware research and threat tracking.

Black Hat Asia returns to the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore March 26-29, 2019. Early registration pricing for Briefings & Trainings ends Friday, January 18, so register before then to get the best price!

For more information on what’s happening at the event and how to register, check out the Black Hat website.