RESEARCH | February 23, 2021

A Practical Approach to Attacking IoT Embedded Designs (II)

In this second and final blog post on this topic, we cover some OTA vulnerabilities we identified in wireless communication protocols, primarily Zigbee and BLE.

As in the previous post, the findings described herein are intended to illustrate the type of vulnerabilities a malicious actor could leverage to attack a specified target to achieve DoS, information leakage, or arbitrary code execution.

These vulnerabilities affect numerous devices within the IoT ecosystem. IOActive worked with the semiconductor vendors to coordinate the disclosure of these security flaws, but it is worth mentioning that due the specific nature of the IoT market and despite the fact that patches are available, a significant number of vulnerable devices will likely never be patched.