Capture: Centralized Library Management for Heterogeneous IoT Devices

With their growing popularity, Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have become attractive targets for attack. Like most modern software systems, IoT device firmware depends on external third-party libraries extensively, increasing the attack surface of IoT devices. Furthermore, we find that the risk is compounded by inconsistent library management practices and delays in applying security updates-sometimes hundreds of days behind the public availability of critical patches-by device vendors. Worse yet, because these dependencies are "baked into" the vendor-controlled firmware, even security-conscious users are unable to take matters into their own hands when it comes to good security hygiene.

We present Capture, a novel architecture for deploying IoT device firmware that addresses this problem by allowing devices on a local network to leverage a centralized hub with third-party libraries that are managed and kept up-to-date by a single trusted entity. An IoT device supporting Capture comprises of two components: Capture-enabled firmware on the device and a remote driver that uses third-party libraries on the Capture hub in the local network. To ensure isolation, we introduce a novel Virtual Device Entity (VDE) interface that facilitates access control between mutually-distrustful devices that reside on the same hub. Our evaluation on a prototype implementation of Capture, along with 9 devices and 3 automation applets ported to our framework, shows that our approach incurs low overhead in most cases (<15% increased latency, <10% additional resources). We show that a single Capture Hub with modest hardware can support hundreds of devices, keeping their shared libraries up-to-date.