ProFactory: Improving IoT Security via Formalized Protocol Customization

As IoT applications gain widespread adoption, it becomes important to design and implement IoT protocols with security. Existing research in protocol security reveals that the majority of disclosed protocol vulnerabilities are caused by incorrectly implemented message parsing and network state machines. Instead of testing and fixing those bugs after development, which is extremely expensive, we would like to avert them upfront. For this purpose, we propose PROFAC-TORY which formally and unambiguously models a protocol, checks model correctness, and generates a secure protocol implementation. We leverage PROFACTORY to generate a group of IoT protocols in the Bluetooth and Zigbee families and the evaluation demonstrates that 82 known vulnerabilities are averted. PROFACTORY will be publicly available [1].