Ran Shister

IoT Security

Reichman University

Graduation: 2022

Bio

Ran works on IoT security, specifically on MUD.

MUDIS tool https://ransh93.github.io/MUDIS/

Publications

Conferences & Workshops
Anat Bremler-Barr, Bar Meyuhas, Ran Shister
IEEE/IFIP NOMS,
2022

Analyzing the network behavior of IoT devices, including which domains, protocols, and ports the device communicates with, is a fundamental challenge for IoT security and identification. Solutions that analyze and manage these areas must be able to learn what constitutes normal device behavior and then extract rules and features to permit only legitimate behavior or identify the device. The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is an IETF white-list protection scheme that formalizes the authorized network behavior in a MUD file; this MUD file can then be used as a type of firewall mechanism.

We demonstrate that learning what is normal behavior for an IoT device is more challenging than expected. In many cases, the same IoT device, with the same firmware, can exhibit different behavior or connect to different domains with different protocols, depending on the device’s geographical location.

Then, we present a technique to generalize MUD files. By processing MUD files that originate in different locations, we can generalize and create a comprehensive MUD file that is applicable for all locations.
To conduct the research, we created MUDIS, a MUD Inspection System tool, that compares and generalizes MUD files. Our open-source MUDIS tool and dataset are available online to researchers and IoT manufacturers, allowing anyone to visualize, compare, and generalize MUD files.

Poster and brief announcement
Anat Bremler-Barr, Bar Meyuhas, Ran Shister
IEEE/IFIP NOMS,
2022

The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is an IETF white-list protection scheme that formalizes the authorized network behavior in a MUD file; this MUD file can then be used as a type of firewall mechanism.

This demo introduces MUDIS, a MUD Inspection System that inspects the network behavior of devices, based on their formal description in the MUD file. We present several use-cases in which MUDIS is useful, including examining the impact of device location, the impact of a firmware update, the correlation of network behavior between different devices of the same manufacture, and more.

MUDIS inspects two MUD files, clusters together and graph- ically visualizes identical, similar, and dissimilar rules. It then calculates a similarity score that measures the similarity between them both. It also generalizes the two MUD files where possible, such that the resulting generalized MUD covers all the permitted (white-list) network behavior for both MUDs.

Our open-source MUDIS tool and proof-of-concept dataset are available for researchers and IoT manufacturers, allowing anyone to gain meaningful insights over the network behavior of IoT devices.

Poster and brief announcement
Anat Bremler-Barr, Bar Meyuhas, Ran Shister
IMC,
2021

Analyzing the network behavior of IoT devices, including which domains, protocols, and ports the device communicates with, is a fundamental challenge for IoT security and identification. Solutions that analyze and manage these areas must be able to learn what constitutes normal device behavior and then extract rules and features to permit only legitimate behavior or to identify the device. The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is an IETF white-list protection scheme that formalizes the authorized network behavior in a MUD file; this MUD file can then be used as a type of firewall mechanism.
We demonstrate that learning what is normal behavior for an IoT device is more challenging than expected. In many cases, the same IoT device, with the same firmware, can exhibit different behavior or connect to different domains with different protocols. This behavior can even change, depending on the device’s geographical location. Thus, MUD functioning and IoT identification methods may not be effective in different locations. The reasons for this vary from country requirements to weak encryption, privacy regulations, CDN-like solutions, and more.