Security for Complex Cyber-Physical and Industrial Control Systems: Current Trends, Limitations, and Challenges

Today’s society relies upon the smooth and secure functioning of the mission-critical infrastructures and their services. Much of this critical infrastructure relies on the complex cyber-physical systems and the industrial control systems. In recent years, securing these two types of systems has been a top priority due to a significant increase in number of attacks. Most of these systems are often several decades old, and they were developed without significant consideration of the security requirements. As such, there is an urgent need to protect these cyber-physical and industrial systems from external vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a survey of the cyber-physical and industrial control systems, and explore the possibility and necessity for security of such systems. We discuss the various types of cyber-physical and industrial control systems currently being used, assess the vulnerabilities of such systems, discuss the literature on the cyber-physical and industrial control systems, and examine some works that propose security standards and models for these types of systems

Securing Real-Time Internet-of-Things

Modern embedded and cyber-physical systems are ubiquitous. A large number of critical cyber-physical systems have real-time requirements (e.g., avionics, automobiles, power grids, manufacturing systems, industrial control systems, etc.). Recent developments and new functionality requires real-time embedded devices to be connected to the Internet. This gives rise to the real-time Internet-of-things (RT-IoT) that promises a better user experience through stronger connectivity and efficient use of next-generation embedded devices. However RT- IoT are also increasingly becoming targets for cyber-attacks which is exacerbated by this increased connectivity. This paper gives an introduction to RT-IoT systems, an outlook of current approaches and possible research challenges towards secure RT- IoT frameworks

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

EXT-TAURUM P2T: an Extended Secure CAN-FD Architecture for Road Vehicles

The automobile industry is no longer relying on pure mechanical systems; instead, it benefits from advanced Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in order to provide new and complex functionalities in the effort to move toward fully connected cars. However, connected cars provide a dangerous playground for hackers. Vehicles are becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks as they come equipped with more connected features and control systems. This situation may expose strategic assets in the automotive value chain. In this scenario, the Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most widely used communication protocol in the automotive domain. However, this protocol lacks encryption and authentication. Consequently, any malicious/hijacked node can cause catastrophic accidents and financial loss. Starting from the analysis of the vulnerability connected to the CAN communication protocol in the automotive domain, this paper proposes EXT-TAURUM P2T a new low-cost secure CAN-FD architecture for the automotive domain implementing secure communication among ECUs, a novel key provisioning strategy, intelligent throughput management, and hardware signature mechanisms. The proposed architecture has been implemented, resorting to a commercial Multi-Protocol Vehicle Interface module, and the obtained results experimentally demonstrate the approach’s feasibility

LoRaWAN device security and energy optimization

Resource-constrained devices are commonly connected to a network and become things that make up the Internet of Things (IoT). Many industries are interested in cost-effective, reliable, and cyber secure sensor networks due to the ever-increasing connectivity and benefits of IoT devices. The full advantages of IoT devices are seen in a long-range and remote context. However, current IoT platforms show many obstacles to achieve a balance between power efficiency and cybersecurity. Battery-powered sensor nodes can reliably send data over long distances with minimal power draw by adopting Long-Range (LoRa) wireless radio frequency technology. With LoRa, these devices can stay active for many years due to a low data bit rate and low power draw during device sleep states. An improvement built on top of LoRa wireless technology, Long-Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN), introduces integrity and confidentiality of the data sent within the IoT network. Although data sent from a LoRaWAN device is encrypted, protocol and implementation vulnerabilities still exist within the network, resulting in security risks to the whole system. In this research, solutions to these vulnerabilities are proposed and implemented on a LoRaWAN testbed environment that contains devices, gateways, and servers. Configurations that involve the transmission of data using AES Round Reduction, Join Scheduling, and Metadata Hiding are proposed in this work. A power consumption analysis is performed on the implemented configurations, resulting in a LoRaWAN system that balances cybersecurity and battery life. The resulting configurations may be harnessed for usage in the safe, secure, and efficient provisioning of LoRaWAN devices in technologies such as Smart-Industry, Smart-Environment, Smart-Agriculture, Smart-Universities, Smart-Cities, et

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial