What is it about?
For computing professionals looking to deepen their understanding of potential security threats, this work presents a new strategy that could be adopted by worms to propagate through the Internet of Things (IoT). The concept hinges on the worms dissecting their code into smaller fragments. These fragments are stealthily and separately transmitted across a network of IoT devices, which often lack robust security measures due to their limited resources. By employing a technique similar to secret sharing, the fragmented worm remains undetectable, since only a portion of its code is present at any given point during the transmission process. Furthermore, this approach ensures that the worm can recover itself completely even if some fragments are lost due to the unreliable nature of wireless networks. The reassembly of the code fragments is the final step in the infection process, allowing the worm to quietly infect the device.
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Why is it important?
Understanding this split-pipeline model of worm propagation can be critical for developing more effective defenses against such nuanced and stealthy threats in the IoT ecosystem.
Perspectives
This short paper was led by four students from Seoul Women's University as joint first authors. It's great to see these women contributing to cybersecurity research early in their computing careers. It's a tribute to my former student, Jun-Won Ho, who oversaw their work.
Matthew Wright
Rochester Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Split-Pipeline Model for Worm Propagation over IoT, November 2016, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/2991561.2998467.
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