The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) raises the crucial question of the security of connected objects, which are particularly vulnerable to attacks. T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis is involved in the research and development of cybersecurity technologies and is particularly interested in IoT security through the European collaborative research project <\/strong>VARIoT<\/strong><\/a> (Vulnerability and Attack Repository for IoT).<\/strong>\u00a0 Here's a look at an ambitious and promising project.<\/strong><\/p>\n The VARIoT project was set up by Gr\u00e9gory Blanc,<\/strong> a teacher-researcher at T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis, lecturer in cybersecurity and networks, coordinator of the third-year specialization in systems and network security<\/a>, and head of European and national projects.<\/p>\n After completing his engineering school internship in a research laboratory in Japan, Gr\u00e9gory Blanc continued his studies with a thesis in the field of cybersecurity. \u201cThe topic was related to client-side scripting, the objective being to protect the browser against attacks that can be organized via malware-infected websites,\u201d<\/em> says Gr\u00e9gory Blanc.<\/p>\n Back in France, the young researcher obtained a postdoc at T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis, with Professor Herv\u00e9 Debar.<\/strong> In 2012, the opportunity arose to participate in a European project in collaboration with Japan. This first project paved the way for collaborations such as the VARIoT project.<\/strong> Initiated by a European call for projects from the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency<\/a> (INEA), this project, which began in 2019 and ends in 2022, involves five European partners on the IT security of connected objects.<\/p>\n Being mass-produced and having a short time-to-market, connected objects are subject to failures in terms of computer security<\/a>. Since their resources are limited, once the operating system and various applications are installed, they have little memory left for security software.\u00a0Security often has to be outsourced, which results in a notorious vulnerability of these objects to attacks.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cFor objects connected to the Internet via a wireless connection, updates can be vulnerable to interception (or Man-in-the-Middle attacks) when integrity and authenticity guarantees are lacking: when requests and responses are not encrypted, the attacker can modify their content, especially if the object does not verify the identity of the update server,\u201d <\/em>explains Gregory Blanc.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u201cAnother very common vulnerability is the administration web portal, like the Telnet service, used as an administration interface by many objects.<\/strong>\u00a0You can connect to it using the administration credentials, which are often left as the default (e.g. admin\/admin). Mirai is known to exploit this vulnerability.<\/em><\/p>\n The attacks work by scanning the Internet for objects responding on the Telnet port that have weak authentication, i.e. with no or insufficiently protective passwords. It is then possible to take control of the objects and install new programs or generate requests on other entities on the Internet in order to create, for example, distributed denial of service attacks (saturation of communication capacities),\u201d<\/em> says Gr\u00e9gory Blanc.<\/p>\n The purpose of VARIoT is to make all the data in the world on the vulnerabilities of connected objects and the attacks that target them available via a set of European web portals. Implementation of the web portal is supported by Carnot T\u00e9l\u00e9com & Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 num\u00e9rique<\/a>. The consortium set up to support the project is made up of T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis, the Polish research institute NASK, the Dutch Shadowserver<\/a> foundation, the Computer Incident Response Center<\/a>\u00a0 in Luxembourg and Mondragon University<\/a> (Spain).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis brings its expertise in intrusion detection.<\/strong> \u201cOur approach is to observe communication on the networks and try to determine whether the messages are issued by legitimate or malicious entities,\u201d <\/em>says Gr\u00e9gory Blanc.\u00a0In the VARIoT project, a number of objects have been deployed in realistic conditions, interacting with humans to generate real traffic.\u00a0This legitimate network profile is integrated into machine learning algorithms, so that an anomaly can be identified as soon as it appears.<\/strong>\u00a0This prevents connected objects that have been infected from sending messages outside the network where they are located. Signatures of previously infected objects will also be collected to provide network behavior profiles of malware. This task is being carried out by Mondragon University, which has proposed a platform to reproduce the infection of an object and capture the network traffic, once this compromised object generates messages.<\/p>\nThe creation of the project<\/h2>\n
Why should we be concerned about the security of connected objects?<\/h2>\n
The basis of the project<\/h2>\n
A collaborative network<\/h2>\n
\n\t VARIoT, the cybersecurity of connected objects <\/h1>\n \n\t <\/header>\n \n T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis<\/h2><\/div><\/section> <\/div>\n \n
T\u00e9l\u00e9com SudParis<\/h2><\/div><\/section> <\/div>\n \n
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