Are you Sure your System Applications are Secure? Reduce Exploit... Kjell Pirschel & Philipp Ahmann
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2022-10-08

Are you Sure your System Applications are Secure? Reduce Exploitation Risk via Application Specific Hardening - Kjell Pirschel, ETAS GmbH & Philipp Ahmann, Robert Bosch GmbH

Any connected IoT system or elements thereof (no matter if application or library) will be confronted with various kind of attacks. There is never a guarantee to be 100% secure. As consequence, it must be accepted, that security issues will occur in IoT applications in the future. Preventive measures have to be taken. 

Even if Bosch uses secure coding guidelines as well as various testing strategies to prevent security issues in its own development, vulnerabilities might be introduced at the interface boundary e.g. by a linked library. In addition, it is expected that not all kinds of security-related bugs can be fully eliminated from the code base. Already a missing compiler parameter can result in a larger attack surface.

With this expectation in mind the idea came up, which exploit mitigations and measures can be applied to enhance the security of a system containing possibly unsecure applications. Discretionary and mandatory access control as well as systemd configurations were picked to evaluate and tailor chosen services (like connman and blueZ) in a plain APERTIS based IoT image. Those additional tailored configurations shall provide service isolation and enhanced exploit mitigation using Linux kernel features which are described in this talk.