Defending Against Firmware Cyber Attacks on Safety-Critical Systems

In the past, it was not possible to update the underlying software in many industrial control devices. Engineering teams had to ‘rip and replace’ obsolete components. However, the ability to make firmware updates has provided significant benefits to the companies who use Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), switches, gateways and bridges as well as an array of smart sensor/actuators. These updates include security patches when vulnerabilities are identified in existing devices; they can be distributed by physical media but are increasingly downloaded over Internet connections. These mechanisms pose a growing threat to the cyber security of safety-critical applications, which are illustrated by recent attacks on safety-related infrastructures across the Ukraine. Subsequent sections explain how malware can be distributed within firmware updates. Even when attackers cannot reverse engineer the code necessary to disguise their attack, they can undermine a device by forcing it into a constant upload cycle where the firmware installation never terminates. In this paper, we present means of mitigating the risks of firmware attack on safety-critical systems as part of wider initiatives to secure national critical infrastructures. Technical solutions, including firmware hashing, must be augmented by organizational measures to secure the supply chain within individual plants, across companies and throughout safety-related industries

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos