IoT Protocols (MQTT and CoAP) are riddled with vulnerabilities

According to TrendMicro, the two most popular IoT protocols are riddled with vulnerabilities which are exploiting multiple organizations environment and causing data breachs, DDoS and targeted attacks.

The vulnerabilities are focusing on the two mostly used machine to machine IoT protocols, MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) and CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol).

By default lack of built-in security in these protocols exposed more than 219 million messages worldwide with in the four months of research periods.

The report clearly defined how these security flaws are helping the hackers to get into the private messages, sensitive information, credentials, and industry related confidential data.

Security issues with the protocols implementation, deployment and design can allow an attacker to malfunction the protocol to get the persistent access and also move laterally across the network.

An arbitrary outbound code can be execute on a vulnerable device to implement a MQTT client, according to CVE-2018-17614.

Data transporting over Telemetry protocol can also be “poisoned” to fulfil the desired operations.

It is also to be said by the customers that the MQTT protocol is being used in Facebook Messenger.

Likewise Bizbox Alpha Mobile lost 55,475 messages out of which 1800 emails in last four months just because of using MQTT protocol for message transmission.

That report warned as the MQTT and CoAP are becoming popular day by day, it can be used not only for DDoS but also in C&C and data exfiltration purposes.

Trend micro suggested that security teams should remove unnecessary M2M services, check if there is any data leakage happening in public IoT services, implement proper vulnerability management model and stay up to date with the latest update.

Reference: www.infosecurity-magazine.com