FIDEM: A Standard-Compliant Framework for Secure Binding of MUD Profiles to IoT Devices

2026-05-28

AI Summary

This work addresses a critical security gap in the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard: the absence of a secure binding mechanism between IoT devices and their MUD files, which enables malicious devices to impersonate legitimate ones and bypass network policies. To resolve this, the authors propose FIDEM, a lightweight framework that establishes secure device–MUD binding without requiring a public key infrastructure (PKI) while maintaining full MUD compatibility. FIDEM integrates zero-knowledge proofs, standardized DHCP extensions, and lightweight cryptographic protocols to enable secure configuration updates with minimal vendor involvement. Experimental evaluation on ESP32-S3/C6 platforms demonstrates that FIDEM incurs only ~5 ms latency and 20 mJ energy overhead—achieving approximately 20× speedup and 35% energy savings compared to conventional certificate-based approaches—while providing robust security guarantees against stronger adversarial models, including supply chain attacks.

Abstract

The Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard enables enforcement of network restrictions for IoT devices based on their expected network traffic, as specified by manufacturers in an online MUD file. Devices advertise a URL pointing to this file, yet the standard does not define how to securely bind the issuing device to its profile. As a result, malicious devices can manipulate network policy enforcement by advertising valid URLs referencing genuine MUD profiles, but not intended for that device. Although MUD defines a certificate-based secure issuance method, current deployments rely on the insecure DHCP-based extension due to simpler integration. Existing solutions either depend on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), break standard compliance, require excessive active manufacturer involvement, or overlook secure profile updates. In this paper, we present FIDEM, a standard-compliant framework for securing DHCP-based MUD URL issuance. FIDEM provides cryptographic binding between IoT devices and their MUD profiles by leveraging Zero-Knowledge-Proof authentication, eliminating PKI reliance, minimizing manufacturers' involvement, and supporting secure profile updates. Formal analysis shows that FIDEM withstands stronger adversaries than in prior work, including supply-chain compromise and attacks using legitimate devices as cryptographic oracles. Our real-world evaluation on two reference constrained devices (ESP32-S3 and ESP32-C6) demonstrates minimal overhead compared to standard DHCP (approximately 5ms and 20mJ) and significant improvements over certificate-based benchmarks (approximately x20 faster, and 35% less energy).

Problem

• MUD
• IoT security
• secure binding
• DHCP-based issuance
• network policy enforcement

Innovation

• Zero-Knowledge Proof
• MUD standard compliance
• Secure device-profile binding
• PKI-free authentication
• Lightweight IoT security