Building Hardened Internet-of-Things Clients with Language-Theoretic Security

Abstract

Unprincipled input handling has caused many of the most prevalent and severe vulnerabilities in the Internet era, and this trend appears to continue in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we present a methodology to build secure input-handling functionality for application-layer IoT protocols by applying the Language-theoretic Security (LangSec) philosophy. We have built working implementations for the XMPP and MQTT protocols and demonstrated that our clients, which consist of less than a hundred lines of code, correctly recognize all valid messages in our tests. With respect to CPU time, our clients compare well against the most widely deployed implementations of these two protocols.