CPU flaws, and cryptographic chips generating weak keys that can be easily broken. My colleagues often hear me say that “firmware is a new software.” And that software is very often flawed. But with today’s “smart” appliances, this is no longer the case. We used to trust that hardware, such as a common kitchen appliance, could be trusted and could not be easily altered without physically dismounting the device. Firmware, the programming inside the device has logical constraints that don’t allow you, for example, to close garage doors while someone is in the way of them or overheat a device so that it combusts.
Let’s say you have an IoT device that is well protected with functions that can be accessed through a well-defined API even if you can control the device through the API, you probably can’t do too much harm. We often say that your home network, thought of as a chain of trust, is only as strong as its weakest link, but what if the same were true at the device level? What would that mean? I also bet that I could make that threat persist and present a true danger to any user. I was asked to prove a myth, call it a suspicion, that the threat to IoT devices is not just to access them via a weak router or exposure to the internet, but that an IoT device itself is vulnerable and can be easily owned without owning the network or the router. Some research is so fun that it confirms why I do this work. Follow us on a journey where we show you that firmware is the new software. While we could, could someone else do it too? As you might expect, the answer is: Yes. We turned a coffee maker into a dangerous machine asking for ransom by modifying the maker’s firmware.
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