P-Verifier: Understanding and Mitigating Security Risks in Cloud-based IoT Access Policies

Abstract

Modern IoT device manufacturers are taking advantage of the managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) IoT clouds (e.g., AWS IoT, Azure IoT) for secure and convenient IoT development/deployment. The IoT access control is achieved by manufacturer-specified, cloud-enforced IoT access policies (cloud-standard JSON documents, called IoT Policies) stating which users can access which IoT devices/resources under what constraints. In this paper, we performed a systematic study on the security of cloud-based IoT access policies on modern PaaS/IaaS IoT clouds. Our research shows that the complexity in the IoT semantics and enforcement logic of the policies leaves tremendous space for device manufacturers to program a flawed IoT access policy, introducing convoluted logic flaws which are non-trivial to reason about. In addition to challenges/mistakes in the design space, it is astonishing to find that mainstream device manufacturers also generally make critical mistakes in deploying IoT Policies thanks to the flexibility offered by PaaS/IaaS clouds and the lack of standard practices for doing so. Our assessment of 36 device manufacturers and 310 open-source IoT projects highlights the pervasiveness and seriousness of the problems, which once exploited, can have serious impacts on IoT users' security, safety, and privacy. To help manufacturers identify and easily fix IoT Policy flaws, we introduce P-Verifier, a formal verification tool that can automatically verify cloud-based IoT Policies. With evaluated high effectiveness and low performance overhead, P-Verifier will contribute to elevating security assurance in modern IoT deployments and access control. We responsibly reported all findings to affected vendors and fixes were deployed or on the way.