IoT Contest Shows Security Gaps

Winning engineer plies open-source tools

Rick Merritt, EETimes, Jan. 31, 2017 – SAN JOSE, Calif. - An engineer with little working experience in security used open-source code to win a challenge finding breaches in a home network. The effort, while promising, showed that there's still plenty of work ahead to close vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things, participants said.

Contestants were provided with two short recordings of RF traffic at a model smart home built in a Bedford, Massachusetts, warehouse. The first was a two-minute baseline of as many as 75 Zigbee and Z-Wave devices in operation. The second recording was made after organizers changed about 40 devices in a mixture of easy, medium, and difficult ways to detect.

"We've been worrying about how you determine what devices are on your network, and we knew it was hard," said Jeff Schwefler, a networking engineer who designed the challenge at Mitre, a firm that operates several U.S. government research centers.

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