Critical Flaws Found in Amazon FreeRTOS IoT Operating System

Oct 19, 2018

A security researcher has discovered several critical
vulnerabilities in one of the most popular embedded real-time
operating systems—called FreeRTOS—and its other variants, exposing
a wide range of IoT devices and critical infrastructure systems to
hackers.

What is FreeRTOS (Amazon, WHIS OpenRTOS, SafeRTOS)?

FreeRTOS is a leading open source real-time operating system (RTOS)
for embedded systems that has been ported to over 40
microcontrollers, which are being used in IoT, aerospace, medical,
automotive industries, and more.

RTOS has specifically been designed to carefully run
applications with very precise timing and a high degree of
reliability, every time.

A pacemaker is an excellent example of the real-time embedded
system that contracts heart muscle at the right time, a process
that can’t afford delays, to keep a person alive.

Since late last year, FreeRTOS project is being managed by
Amazon, who created Amazon FreeRTOS ^[1]
(a:FreeRTOS) IoT operating system for microcontrollers by upgrading
FreeRTOS kernel and some of its components.

Amazon enhanced FreeRTOS functionalities by adding modules for
secure connectivity, over the air updates, code signing, AWS cloud
support, and more.

Besides Amazon, WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS) also
maintains two variants of FreeRTOS—a commercial version of FreeRTOS
called WHIS
OpenRTOS ^[2], and a safety-oriented
RTOS called SafeRTOS ^[3], for use in
safety-critical devices.

FreeRTOS Vulnerabilities and Security Patches

Ori Karliner, a security researcher at Zimperium Security Labs
(zLabs), discovered ^[4]
a total of 13 vulnerabilities in FreeRTOS’s TCP/IP stack that also
affect its variants maintained by Amazon and WHIS, as shown
below:

The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to crash the target
device, leak information from its memory, and the most worrisome,
remotely execute malicious code on it, thus taking complete control
over the target device.

“During our research, we discovered multiple vulnerabilities within
FreeRTOS’s TCP/IP stack and in the AWS secure connectivity modules.
The same vulnerabilities are present in WHIS Connect TCP/IP
component for OpenRTOS\SafeRTOS,” the researcher says.

According to the researcher, the vulnerabilities affect FreeRTOS
versions up to 10.0.1 (with FreeRTOS+TCP), AWS FreeRTOS versions up
to 1.3.1, and WHIS OpenRTOS and SafeRTOS (With WHIS Connect
middleware TCP/IP components).

Zimperium responsibly reported the vulnerabilities to Amazon,
and the company yesterday deployed security patches ^[5]
for AWS FreeRTOS versions 1.3.2 and onwards (latest v1.4.2).

“We also received confirmation from WHIS that they were exposed to
the same vulnerabilities, and those were patched together with
Amazon,” zLabs says.

To allow smaller vendors to patch the issues before attackers try
to leverage them, zLabs has decided not to disclose technical
details of these vulnerabilities to the public for at least a
month.

References

^{^}
Amazon FreeRTOS
(aws.amazon.com)
^{^}
WHIS OpenRTOS
(www.highintegritysystems.com)
^{^}
SafeRTOS
(www.highintegritysystems.com)
^{^}
discovered
(blog.zimperium.com)
^{^}
security patches
(github.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Critical Flaws Found in Amazon FreeRTOS IoT Operating System

What is FreeRTOS (Amazon, WHIS OpenRTOS, SafeRTOS)?

FreeRTOS Vulnerabilities and Security Patches

References

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