Critical Flaws Found in Amazon FreeRTOS IoT Operating System

Ganesh The Awesome Senior Pre & Post-Sales Engineer at GlobalDots

22nd October, 2018 1 Min read

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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