Microsoft has confirmed its acquisition of ReFirm Labs as part of a broader effort to improve the security of Internet of Things devices. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ReFirm's team are the developers behind Binwalk Open Source, a tool designed for detecting and extracting files and code inside firmware images. Binwalk was launched in 2010; since then, its tech has evolved into a lineup of products that find and report known flaws, potential zero-days, cryptography keys, backdoor passwords, and other issues in IoT devices. ReFirm Labs was founded in 2017 with this broader collection of enterprise vulnerability management tools.
Its technology plays an important role in the IoT security space, explains David Weston, director of enterprise and operating system security at Microsoft, which is "bridging the gap that we have today between IT and OT … and that is making sure you can do basic things like vulnerability assessments and identifying missing patches and security issues on IoT devices."
There is a demand for capabilities that make it easier to assess and maintain the security of connected devices, from smart lightbulbs to OT tools, Weston says. ReFirm Labs' tech meets this need without demanding security teams have expertise in reverse engineering firmware.
What ReFirm Labs brings to Azure Defender for IoT and other security products is "essentially drag-and-drop security analysis," he continues. Users can take the firmware and drag it onto the ReFirm product, which decompresses it and uses its firmware extraction technology to assess each file in the firmware package and look for known vulnerabilities, predictable passwords, and loose secrets, such as private keys, then produce a report and database entry based on ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
