Ransomware Mitigation for Internet of Things

Abstract

As the list of Internet of Things’ (IoT) devices, and the advantages they offer, continues to grow, the security threats to these devices continue to flourish. Most dangerous and irrepressible among these threats is ransomware that not only causes severe fiscal losses but also puts the security and integrity of the individuals and organizations’ data at risk. With revolutionary ingress of IoTs devices and Businesses setups, ransomware can now be anticipated as a threat to the user’s life since smart devices’ security is a field that still lags behind device manufacturing. Ransomware has never been a term unknown to the field of cyber security. As the technology continues to advance with new malware detection tools and security measures, attack surface keeps growing owing to addition of new systems and devices. One such case is the risk of ransomware attacks in IoT devices and networks. IoTs have amalgamated in our daily lives with their applications in every industry targeting from households to national infrastructures. Yet the security techniques for the data protection for IoTs lag behind their development pace. These devices offer potential attack space to hackers and can put large sum of data at stake making their users vulnerable to such attacks that may result in huge data and money loss. In this study we take Raspbian operating system as a case study to analyze the impact of ransomware attack on IoT based system. To show the significance of ransomware in IoT we created the modified linux ransomware for IoT. The implementation shows that the existing linux ransomware can be modified and executed on IoT devices easily. The study further suggests the mitigation techniques for such ransomware attacks such as: kernel hardening by limiting sudo (super user do) privileges, access denial for “debugfs functionality”, and restricting the developmental tool installation. The results show that device security can be enhanced through sudo restriction without significantly effecting device functionality as IoT devices are perfectly fine without user having root access.