Top 25 IoT Security Testing Tools

Managing IoT devices is currently a real threat around the globe. As more and more IoT devices are installed, the risk is increasing day by day. To mitigate risk, effective security evaluation is mandatory by third-party auditors. Evaluation of IoT devices may be divided into the below types:

• Threat modeling of IoT device
• Firmware Security Testing
• Architecture Review of IoT device
• Design Review of IoT device
• Code Review
• Web Interface Security of IoT device
• Mobile Interface Security of IoT device
• API Security
• Protocol fuzzing
• Penetration Testing

For each evaluation type, different tools are required. I am listing out 20 IoT Security Testing Tools which are required for the security testing of IoT devices:

1. Wireshark - Free and powerful network protocol analyzer. IoT devices use different protocols (e.g. MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol) for communication. Therefore, configure the rule based on the protocol and analyze the traffic to identify vulnerabilities. Refer Wireshark tutorial to understand more about this tool.
2. Shodan - Search engine of the Internet of things (IoT). This tool is able to locate IoT devices exposed to the internet insecurely. It helps you to identify the digital footprints of IoT devices in a network.
3. Tcpdump - command-line-based data network packet analyzer. This tool is similar to Wireshark and helps users to analyze data packets received and transmitted by IoT devices over a network. Refer tcpdump tutorial to understand more about this tool.
4. Nmap - Network mapper. A powerful tool available free to identify open ports. Refer to Nmap Cheatsheet to understand more about this tool.
5. Nessus - Vulnerability scanner to check the hardening of operating system and network devices. Most of the features of this tool are available in the professional paid version.
6. Binwalk - Firmware reverse engineering tool. Refer to the Binwalk tutorial to understand more about this tool.
7. Ghidra - a powerful free reverse engineering tool developed by NSA.
8. BurpSuite - Application security testing software. This tool helps in assessing the security of web interfaces of IoT devices. This tool is rich in functionality and most features (like Repeater, Intruder etc.) are available in the community (free) edition. The professional version of this tool has scanning features that help you to identify web application security issues. Refer Burpsuite tutorial to understand more about this tool.
9. Acutenix - Web Application security scanner. This tool does not provide any feature in the free version.
10. Firmadyne - Open source tool for performing emulation and dynamic analysis of embedded firmware. You can download this tool from here.
11. MobSF - Opensource mobile security evaluation framework. This tool helps in analyzing both iOS and Android based mobile web applications.
12. HCL AppScan - Web Application security scanner. This tool does not provide any feature in the free version.
13. Frida - Dynamic instrumentation toolkit for Android and iOS assessment. This tool can be downloaded from this link.
14. MicroFocus WebInspect - Web Application security scanner with automated dynamic application security testing (DAST). This tool does not provide any feature in the free version.
15. Nikto - Command-line based Web server scanning tool. This tool is not very sophisticated but provides good security issues. Refer Nikto tutorial to learn more about this tool.
16. Qemu - generic and open source machine emulator and virtualized. It helps in emulating embedded Linux devices.
17. Metasploit - Penetration testing framework helps in validating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the target system. Metasploit is available in the free and paid (Metasploit Pro) version. Metasploit Pro automates the whole task of identifying and exploiting known vulnerabilties.
18. Postman - Helps in API testing.
19. Firmwalker - Open source tool helps in searching the extracted or mounted firmware file system. You can download this tool from this link.
20. flawfinder - This tool helps in identifying security flaws in C/C++ source code. You can download this tool from this link.
21. radare2 - open source reverse engineering tool. You can download this tool from this link.
22. masscan - network scanning tool. This tool is much faster in scanning targets then Nmap. Refer massscan tutorial to learn more about this tool.
23. tshark - network protocol analyzer. This tool is similar to tcpdump. Refer tshark tutorial to learn more about this tool.
24. Objection - Android and iOS analyzer tool. You can download this tool from this link.
25. Routersploit - Open source Exploitation framework for embedded devices. You can download this tool from this link.

Conclusion

In this blog, I have mentioned the Top 25 IoT Security Testing Tools that help you assess the security of the ecosystem of IoT devices. Mention more tools if I miss any excellent tools in the list.