Venture Memoria and flaws in embedded TCP/IP stacks
Many client IoT units these days, equivalent to routers, modems, network-attached storage (NAS) packing containers, and community video recorders (NVRs) use firmware based mostly on the Linux kernel. However industrial and medical embedded units nonetheless depend on proprietary real-time working methods (RTOSes) equivalent to VxWorks for his or her firmware.
Regardless that this implies there’s extra firmware range within the industrial IoT world, there are nonetheless some elements that may be shared by completely different RTOSes, together with TCP/IP stacks. These advanced codebases implement a number of the Web’s core protocols — DNS, HTTP, FTP, ARP, ICMP, and so on. — and had been written a long time in the past as proprietary libraries that had been then offered to embedded working system distributors.
In 2020, researchers from security agency Forescout in collaboration with universities and different corporations launched a mission to investigate proprietary TCP/IP stacks utilized in industrial units. Generally known as Venture Memoria, the analysis lasted 18 months and led to the invention of 104 vulnerabilities, many crucial, in a number of TCP/IP stacks and libraries utilized in over 250,000 embedded system fashions from greater than 500 distributors.
