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Main Authors: Dahlmanns, Markus, Heidenreich, Felix, Lohmöller, Johannes, Pennekamp, Jan, Wehrle, Klaus, Henze, Martin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13799
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author Dahlmanns, Markus
Heidenreich, Felix
Lohmöller, Johannes
Pennekamp, Jan
Wehrle, Klaus
Henze, Martin
author_facet Dahlmanns, Markus
Heidenreich, Felix
Lohmöller, Johannes
Pennekamp, Jan
Wehrle, Klaus
Henze, Martin
contents Internet-wide studies provide extremely valuable insight into how operators manage their Internet of Things (IoT) deployments in reality and often reveal grievances, e.g., significant security issues. However, while IoT devices often use IPv6, past studies resorted to comprehensively scan the IPv4 address space. To fully understand how the IoT and all its services and devices is operated, including IPv6-reachable deployments is inevitable-although scanning the entire IPv6 address space is infeasible. In this paper, we close this gap and examine how to best discover IPv6-reachable IoT deployments. To this end, we propose a methodology that allows combining various IPv6 scan direction approaches to understand the findability and prevalence of IPv6-reachable IoT deployments. Using three sources of active IPv6 addresses and eleven address generators, we discovered 6658 IoT deployments. We derive that the available address sources are a good starting point for finding IoT deployments. Additionally, we show that using two address generators is sufficient to cover most found deployments and save time as well as resources. Assessing the security of the deployments, we surprisingly find similar issues as in the IPv4 Internet, although IPv6 deployments might be newer and generally more up-to-date: Only 39% of deployments have access control in place and only 6.2% make use of TLS inviting attackers, e.g., to eavesdrop sensitive data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_13799
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unconsidered Installations: Discovering IoT Deployments in the IPv6 Internet
Dahlmanns, Markus
Heidenreich, Felix
Lohmöller, Johannes
Pennekamp, Jan
Wehrle, Klaus
Henze, Martin
Networking and Internet Architecture
Internet-wide studies provide extremely valuable insight into how operators manage their Internet of Things (IoT) deployments in reality and often reveal grievances, e.g., significant security issues. However, while IoT devices often use IPv6, past studies resorted to comprehensively scan the IPv4 address space. To fully understand how the IoT and all its services and devices is operated, including IPv6-reachable deployments is inevitable-although scanning the entire IPv6 address space is infeasible. In this paper, we close this gap and examine how to best discover IPv6-reachable IoT deployments. To this end, we propose a methodology that allows combining various IPv6 scan direction approaches to understand the findability and prevalence of IPv6-reachable IoT deployments. Using three sources of active IPv6 addresses and eleven address generators, we discovered 6658 IoT deployments. We derive that the available address sources are a good starting point for finding IoT deployments. Additionally, we show that using two address generators is sufficient to cover most found deployments and save time as well as resources. Assessing the security of the deployments, we surprisingly find similar issues as in the IPv4 Internet, although IPv6 deployments might be newer and generally more up-to-date: Only 39% of deployments have access control in place and only 6.2% make use of TLS inviting attackers, e.g., to eavesdrop sensitive data.
title Unconsidered Installations: Discovering IoT Deployments in the IPv6 Internet
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13799