On the Analysis of MUD-Files' Interactions, Conflicts, and Configuration Requirements Before Deployment

Abstract

Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard designed to protect IoT devices and networks by creating an out-of-the-box access control list for an IoT device. Access control list of each device is defined in its MUD-File and may contain possibly hundreds of access control rules. As a result, reading and validating these files is a challenge; and determining how multiple IoT devices interact is difficult for the developer and infeasible for the consumer. To address this we introduce the MUD-Visualizer to provide a visualization of any number of MUD-Files. MUD-Visualizer is designed to enable developers to produce correct MUD-Files by providing format correction, integrating them with other MUD-Files, and identifying conflicts through visualization. MUD-Visualizer is scalable and its core task is to merge and illustrate ACEs for multiple devices; both within and beyond the local area network. MUD-Visualizer is made publicly available and can be found in GitHub.