On Friday, 17 July 2020, I will be talking at the Computing Conference 2020. This conference going was going to be held in London but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now going to be held fully online. I am especially excited to listen to the keynote of Vinton G. Cerf. He is widely known as a “father of the Internet”. Cerf is also the vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. During the conference, I will be talking about Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and how commercial devices are prone to severe forms of this attack.
DoS is a widely used attack vector by various malicious threat agents from hackers to nation-states. Its consequences range from a nuisance to loss of revenues to even loss of life. Think about for instance the effects of disabling medical devices such as pacemakers, drones and weapon systems, connected alarm systems, and so on. In the case of smart homes, DoS may be the first attack to remove a component from a network to exploit a vulnerability. In our study, we found devices manufactured by established commercial players prone especially to HTTP GET DoS attacks. This can result in the complete shutdown of the device, possibly remotely, by using a simple exploit with code available over the Internet.
DoS attacks targeting the smart connected home.
Take a look at the conference agenda and have a read of my conference paper. I will be uploading my presentation slides after the conference is held under my Presentations tab.
Feel free to drop me a message or get in touch if you want to know more about this topic or in case you are interested in information security.