good programming practices to avoid common errors,
and also to ensure that software remains sufficiently
simple in devices to be analyzed by existing tools. As
expected, the software fault pattern profile for devices
is different from the one of software products. These
software products generally exhibit data manipulation
issues of various origin, that enable the attacker to
compromise the software through code injection.
Devices seem to be easily exploitable over the
network, with a low complexity. This is coherent
with the observation that authentication issues are the
most prevalent, because we have experience of de-
fault password sharing lists or backdoor information
being widely shared for a long period of time. The
major impact of vulnerabilities on devices is on con-
fidentiality, as only 10% list no impact and 72% list a
high impact. Integrity and availability are slightly less
impacted. Also, one has to note that the impact of
vulnerabilities on software is generally less and less
widespread than the impact of vulnerabilities on de-
vices. Half of the device vulnerabilities list a high
impact in the 3 dimensions, while this is the case for
only 32% of the pure software vulnerabilities.
The devices have a different patching profile than
pure software. On one hand this is not surprising
because devices require more effort to patch. On
the other hand, medical devices (contrary to the ones
found in for example smart homes) are managed by
professional, and contrary to other settings (e.g. in-
dustry) it is possible to have shorter usage lifecycle
that could fit a patching model. Furthermore, critical
infrastructure has a requirement to maintain these de-
vices in order to remediate cybersecurity issues. The
gap is closing in recent years, but effort is still re-
quired to continue in this direction.
The findings were then placed in the context of
the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which provides
a standard representation for improving the cyberse-
curity of critical infrastructure. Out of the five (Iden-
tify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover) functions of
the framework, the first and the last are mostly orga-
nizational. The analysis shed only a limited light on
the recommendations of the framework, demonstrat-
ing mostly that continuous improvement in cyberse-
curity is also shown in advisories.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was performed while Herv
´
e Debar was a
visiting professor with the Center for Trustworthy IoT
Infrastructure at Japan Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology (JAIST) in Ishikawa, Japan.
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