A study on the security threats of IoT devices exposed in search engine

Abstract

IoT devices including smart devices are connected with internet, thus they have security threats everytime. Particularly, IoT devices are composed of low performance MCU and small-capacity memory because they are miniaturized, so they are likely to be exposed to various security threats like DoS attacks. In addition, in case of IoT devices installed for a remote place, it's not easy for users to control continuously them and to install immediately security patch for them. For most of IoT devices connected directly with internet under user's intention, devices exposed to outside by setting IoT gateway, and devices exposed to outside by the DMZ function or Port Forwarding function of router, specific protocol for IoT services was used and the devices show a response when services about related protocol are required from outside. From internet search engine for IoT devices, IP addresses are inspected on the basis of protocol mainly used for IoT devices and then IP addresses showing a response are maintained as database, so that users can utilize related information. Specially, IoT devices using HTTP and HTTPS protocol, which are used at usual web server, are easily searched at usual search engines like Google as well as search engine for the sole IoT devices. Ill-intentioned attackers get the IP addresses of vulnerable devices from search engine and try to attack the devices. The purpose of this study is to find the problems arisen when HTTP, HTTPS, CoAP, SOAP, and RestFUL protocols used for IoT devices are detected by search engine and are maintained as database, and to seek the solution for the problems. In particular, when the user ID and password of IoT devices set by manufacturing factory are still same or the already known vulnerabilities of IoT devices are not patched, the dangerousness of the IoT devices and its related solution were found in this study.