On the Security of Thread Networks: Experimentation with OpenThread-Enabled Devices

Abstract

The Thread networking protocol is expected to be utilized by a plethora of smart home devices as one of the IP-based networking technologies that will be supported by the Matter standard that is being developed by members of the Connectivity Standards Alliance. Thread has been developed by the Thread Group as an application-agnostic protocol that builds on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard to enable IPv6-based low-power wireless mesh networking. However, unlike other IEEE 802.15.4-based protocols like Zigbee, the security of Thread networks has been relatively less analyzed in the literature. Given that commercial Thread devices are expected to interact with the physical world, vulnerabilities in their communication protocols could impact the physical security of end users. In this work we analyze the security of Thread networks by repurposing hardware and software tools that have been used for the security analysis of Zigbee networks. We used development boards that were flashed with OpenThread binaries to gain insight into the nature of Thread traffic and to study their susceptibility to a set of energy depletion attacks and online password guessing attacks. Lastly, we are publicly releasing our software enhancements as well as our dataset of captured Thread packets.