All Things Considered: An Analysis of IoT Devices on Home Networks Deepak Kumar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Kelly Shen and Benton Case, Stanford University; Deepali Garg, Galina Alperovich, Dmitry Kuznetsov, and Rajarshi Gupta, Avast Software s.r.o.; Zakir Durumeric, Stanford University https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/kumar-deepak This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium. August 14–16, 2019 • Santa Clara, CA, USA 978-1-939133-06-9 Open access to the Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium is sponsored by USENIX. All Things Considered: An Analysis of IoT Devices on Home Networks Deepak Kumar‡ Kelly Shen† Benton Case† Deepali Garg/ Galina Alperovich/ Dmitry Kuznetsov/ Rajarshi Gupta/ Zakir Durumeric† †Stanford University /Avast Software ‡University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Abstract vulnerabilities. Leveraging data collected from user-initiated network scans in 16M households that have agreed to share In this paper, we provide the first large-scale empirical anal- data for research and development purposes, we describe the ysis of IoT devices in real-world homes by leveraging data current landscape of IoT devices and their security posture. collected from user-initiated network scans of 83M devices IoT devices are widespread. More than half of households in 16M households. We find that IoT adoption is widespread: have at least one IoT device in three global regions and in on several continents, more than half of households already North America more than 70% of homes have a network- have at least one IoT device. Device types and manufac- connected device. Media devices like smart televisions are turer popularity vary dramatically across regions. For ex- most common in seven of eleven global regions, but there ample, while nearly half of North American homes have an is significant variance otherwise. For example, surveillance Internet-connected television or streaming device, less than cameras are most popular in South and Southeast Asia, while three percent do in South Asia where the majority of devices work appliances prevail in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. are surveillance cameras. We investigate the security posture Home assistants are present in more than 10% of homes in of devices, detailing their open services, weak default cre- North America but have yet to see significant adoption in dentials, and vulnerability to known attacks. Device security other markets. There is a long tail of 14K total manufacturers, similarly varies geographically, even for specific manufac- but surprisingly we find that 90% of devices worldwide are turers. For example, while less than 17% of TP-Link home produced by only 100 vendors. A handful of companies routers in North America have guessable passwords, nearly like Apple, HP, and Samsung dominate globally, but there half do in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We argue that also exist a set of smaller vendors with significant regional IoT devices are here, but for most homes, the types of devices adoption. For example, Vestel, a Turkish manufacturer, is the adopted are not the ones actively discussed. We hope that third largest media vendor in North Africa and the Middle by shedding light on this complex ecosystem, we help the East, but has negligible broader adoption. security community develop solutions that are applicable to today’s homes. A surprising number of devices still support FTP and Telnet with weak credentials. In Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, around half of devices 1 Introduction support FTP and in Central Asia, nearly 40% of home routers use Telnet. Similar to the regional differences in device type The weak security posture of many popular IoT devices and manufacturer popularity, there are dramatic differences has enabled attackers to launch record-breaking DDoS at- in the use of weak credentials. For example, while less than tacks [4], compromise local networks [43, 57], and break into 15% of devices with FTP allow weak authentication in Eu- homes [22, 41]. However, despite much attention to IoT in rope and Oceania, more than half do in Southeast Asia and the security community [22, 23, 29, 33, 55], there has been Sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, this is not entirely due to little investigation into what devices consumers are adopting manufacturer preference. While less than 20% of TP-Link and how they are configured in practice. In this work, we home routers allow access to their administration interface provide a large-scale empirical analysis of 83M IoT devices with a weak password in North America, nearly half do in in 16M real-world homes. We partner with Avast Software, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. About 3% a popular antivirus company, whose consumer security soft- of homes in our dataset are externally visible and more than ware lets customers scan their local network for IoT devices half of those have a known vulnerability or weak password. that support weak authentication or have remotely exploitable Our results indicate that IoT is not a security concern of the USENIX Association 28th USENIX Security Symposium 1169 (a) Data Sharing Consent (b) WiFi Inspector Drawer (c) WiFi Inspector Initiation Figure 1: WiFi Inspector—WiFi Inspector allows users to scan their local network for insecure IoT devices. Data sharing back to Avast for research purposes is an explicit part of the installation process, and presented to the user in plain English. For ease of reading, we duplicate the text shown in panel (a) in AppendixA. future, but rather one of today. We argue that there already Network Scanning To inventory the local network, WiFi exists a complex ecosystem of Internet-connected embedded Inspector first generates a list of scan candidates from entries devices in homes worldwide, but that these devices are of in the local ARP table as well through active ARP, SSDP, and different than the ones considered by most recent work. We mDNS scans. It then probes targets in increasing IP order hope that by shedding light on the types of devices consumers over ICMP and common TCP/UDP ports to detect listening are purchasing, we enable the security community to develop services.1 Scans terminate after the local network has been solutions that are applicable to today’s homes. scanned or a timeout occurs. After the discovery process completes, the scanner attempts to gather application layer 2 Methodology and Dataset data (e.g., HTTP root page, UPnP root device description, and Telnet banner) from listening services. Our study leverages several network vantage points, including Detecting Device Types To provide users with a human- data collected from Avast, a passive network telescope, and readable list of hosts on their network, WiFi Inspector runs a active Internet-wide scans. In this section, we discuss these classification algorithm against the application-and transport- datasets and the role they play in our analysis. layer data collected in the scan. This algorithm buckets de- vices into one of fourteen categories: 2.1 WiFi Inspector 1. Computer Avast Software is a security software company that provides 2. Network Node (e.g., home router) a suite of popular antivirus and consumer security software 3. Mobile Device (e.g., iPhone or Android) products like Avast Free Antivirus. Avast software is sold on 4. Wearable (e.g., Fitbit, Apple Watch) a freemium model: the company provides a free basic version 5. Game Console (e.g., XBox) of their product and charges for more advanced versions. 6. Home Automation (e.g., Nest Thermostat) Avast estimates that their software runs on 160 M Windows 7. Storage (e.g., home NAS) and 3 M Mac OS computers, and makes up approximately 8. Surveillance (e.g., IP camera) 12% of the antivirus market share [45]. 9. Work Appliance (e.g., printer or scanner) As of 2015, all antivirus products from Avast include a tool called WiFi Inspector that helps users secure IoT devices 10. Home Voice Assistant (e.g., Alexa) and other computers on their home networks. WiFi Inspector 11. Vehicle (e.g., Tesla) runs locally on the user’s personal computer and performs 12. Media/TV (e.g., Roku) network scans of the local subnet to check for devices 13. Home Appliance (e.g., smart fridge) that accept weak credentials or have remotely exploitable 14. Generic IoT (e.g., toothbrush) vulnerabilities. Scans can also be manually initiated by the 1WiFi Inspector scans several groups of TCP/UDP ports: common TCP end user. WiFi Inspector alerts users to security problems ports (e.g., 80, 443, 139, 445); TCP ports associated with security problems it finds during these scans and additionally provides an (e.g., 111, 135, 161); common UDP ports (e.g., 53, 67, 69); and ports inventory of labeled IoT devices and vulnerabilities in the associated with services that provide data for device labeling (e.g., 20, 21, product’s main interface (Figure1). We next describe how 22). When hosts are timely in responding, the scanner will additionally probe a second set of less common ports (e.g., 81–85, 9971). In total, the scanner WiFi Inspector operates: will target up to 200 ports depending on host performance. The scanner will identify devices so long as they are connected to the network. 1170 28th USENIX Security Symposium USENIX Association Protocol Field Search Pattern Device Type Label Confidence DHCP Class ID (?i)SAMSUNG[- :_]Network[- :_]Printer Printer 0.90 UPnP Device Type .*hub2.* IoT Hub 0.90 HTTP Title (?i)Polycom - (?:SoundPoint IP )?(?:SoundStation IP )? IP Phone 0.85 mDNS Name (?i)_nanoleaf(?:api|ms)?\._tcp\.local\. Lighting 0.90 Table 1: Example Device Classification Rules—Our device labeling algorithm combines a collection of 1,000 expert rules and a supervised classifier, both of which utilize network and application layer data.