SIoT: securing the internet of things through distributed system analysis

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly more relevant. This growing importance calls for tools able to provide users with correct, reliable and secure systems. In this paper, we claim that traditional approaches to analyze distributed systems are not expressive enough to address this challenge. As a solution to this problem, we present SIoT, a framework to analyze networked systems. SIoT's key insight is to look at a distributed system as a single body, and not as separate programs that exchange messages. By doing so, we can crosscheck information inferred from different nodes. This crosschecking increases the precision of traditional static analyses. To construct this global view of a distributed system we introduce a novel algorithm that discovers inter-program links efficiently. Such links lets us build a holistic view of the entire network, a knowledge that we can thus forward to a traditional tool. We prove that our algorithm always terminates and that it correctly models the semantics of a distributed system. To validate our solution, we have implemented SIoT on top of the LLVM compiler, and have used one instance of it to secure 6 ContikiOS applications against buffer overflow attacks. This instance of SIoT produces code that is as safe as code secured by more traditional analyses; however, our binaries are on average 18% more energy-efficient.