Avast to Present 5G Smart Home Security Solution to Reduce Attack Surfaces at Hotedge ’20

By AIT News Desk On Jun 23, 2020

Avast’s Armin Wasicek to present research on micro segmentation of smart homes along with researchers from the Technical University of Dresden and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Armin Wasicek, Senior Data Scientist at Avast, a global leader in digital security and privacy products, will present research he conducted with Amr Osman, Stefan Köpsell, researchers from Germany’s Technical University of Dresden, and Thorsten Stufe, researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology at USENIX HotEdge ’20. The conference will take place virtually this year from June 25-26, 2020. The researchers will present how transparent microsegmentation makes homes more secure by reducing attack surfaces in 5G-enabled smart home networks.

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“IDC predicts that there will be around 41.6 billion connected IoT devices in 2025, and in a 5G world many of them will connect directly to the network which brings new cyber security challenges and opportunities alike. Smart home devices typically are connected constantly, often have vulnerable, out-of-date firmware, and collect sensitive data which they send to the cloud. The segmentation of 5G networks offers opportunities for carriers to create new types of protection mechanisms from Avast for their subscribers. At Hotedge ’20, my fellow researchers from TU Dresden, KIT, and I will explain how IoT devices can be isolated in microsegments, using network-level security policies, to keep people’s homes safe,” said Armin Wasicek, Senior Data Scientist, Avast.

Once an attacker successfully gains access to a single device, the entire network, including other IoT devices connected to the same network are at risk. However, in their talk, the experts will present how they implemented a virtual network function to enforce fine-grained network security policies in smart homes. The research shows that microsegmentation reduces the attack surface exposed to a Mirai-infected IoT webcam by up to 65.85% at the cost of preventing 2.16% of the otherwise-valid network flows between devices, providing carriers with a unique opportunity to protect their 5G customers’ homes.