A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications

A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE

RADIS: Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services

Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trustworthiness of a potentially untrusted device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an interoperable IoT system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trustworthiness of distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity status of a distributed IoT service.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 2 table

Monitoring the health and integrity of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) will play a major role in the Internet of Things collecting the data that will support decision-making and enable the automation of many applications. Nevertheless, the introduction of these devices into our daily life raises serious concerns about their integrity. Therefore, at any given point, one must be able to tell whether or not a node has been compromised. Moreover, it is crucial to understand how the compromise of a particular node or set of nodes may affect the network operation. In this thesis, we present a framework to monitor the health and integrity of WSNs that allows us to detect compromised devices and comprehend how they might impact a network’s performance. We start by investigating the use of attestation to identify malicious nodes and advance the state of the art by exploring limitations of existing mechanisms. Firstly, we tackle effectiveness and scalability by combining attestation with measurements inspection and show that the right combination of both schemes can achieve high accuracy whilst significantly reducing power consumption. Secondly, we propose a novel stochastic software-based attestation approach that relaxes a fundamental and yet overlooked assumption made in the literature significantly reducing time and energy consumption while improving the detection rate of honest devices. Lastly, we propose a mathematical model to represent the health of a WSN according to its abilities to perform its functions. Our model combines the knowledge regarding compromised nodes with additional information that quantifies the importance of each node. In this context, we propose a new centrality measure and analyse how well existing metrics can rank the importance each sensor node has on the network connectivity. We demonstrate that while no measure is invariably better, our proposed metric outperforms the others in the vast majority of cases.Open Acces

Distributed IoT Attestation via Blockchain (Extended Version)

The growing number and nature of Internet of Things (IoT) devices makes these resource-constrained appliances particularly vulnerable and increasingly impactful in their exploitation. Current estimates for the number of connected things commonly reach the tens of billions. The low-cost and limited computational strength of these devices can preclude security features. Additionally, economic forces and a lack of industry expertise in security often contribute to a rush to market with minimal consideration for security implications. It is essential that users of these emerging technologies, from consumers to IT professionals, be able to establish and retain trust in the multitude of diverse and pervasive compute devices that are ever more responsible for our critical infrastructure and personal information. Remote attestation is a well-known technique for building such trust between devices. In standard implementations, a potentially untrustworthy prover attests, using public key infrastructure, to a verifier about its configuration or properties of its current state. Attestation is often performed on an ad hoc basis with little concern for historicity. However, controls and sensors manufactured for the Industrial IoT (IIoT) may be expected to operate for decades. Even in the consumer market, so-called smart things can be expected to outlive their manufacturers. This longevity combined with limited software or firmware patching creates an ideal environment for long-lived zero-day vulnerabilities. Knowing both if a device is vulnerable and if so when it became vulnerable is a management nightmare as IoT deployments scale. For network connected machines, with access to sensitive information and real-world physical controls, maintaining some sense of a device\u27s lifecycle would be insightful. In this paper, we propose a novel attestation architecture, DAN: a distributed attestation network, utilizing blockchain to store and share device information. We present the design of this new attestation architecture, and describe a virtualized simulation, as well as a prototype system chosen to emulate an IoT deployment with a network of Raspberry Pi, Infineon TPMs, and a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. We discuss the implications and potential challenges of such a network for various applications such as identity management, intrusion detection, forensic audits, and regulatory certification

Remote attestation to ensure the security of future Internet of Things services

The Internet of Things (IoT) evolution is gradually reshaping the physical world into smart environments that involve a large number of interconnected resource-constrained devices which collect, process, and exchange enormous amount of (more or less) sensitive information. With the increasing number of interconnected IoT devices and their capabilities to control the environment, IoT systems are becoming a prominent target of sophisticated cyberattacks. To deal with the expanding attack surface, IoT systems require adequate security mechanisms to verify the reliability of IoT devices. Remote attestation protocols have recently gained wide attention in IoT systems as valuable security mechanisms that detect the adversarial presence and guarantee the legitimate state of IoT devices. Various attestation schemes have been proposed to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of remote attestation protocols of a single IoT device or a group of IoT devices. Nevertheless, some cyber attacks remain undetected by current attestation methods, and attestation protocols still introduce non-negligible computational overheads for resource-constrained devices. This thesis presents the following new contributions in the area of remote attestation protocols that verify the trustworthiness of IoT devices. First, this thesis shows the limitations of existing attestation protocols against runtime attacks which, by compromising a device, may maliciously influence the operation of other genuine devices that interact with the compromised one. To detect such an attack, this thesis introduces the service perspective in remote attestation and presents a synchronous remote attestation protocol for distributed IoT services. Second, this thesis designs, implements and evaluates a novel remote attestation scheme that releases the constraint of synchronous interaction between devices and enables the attestation of asynchronous distributed IoT services. The proposed scheme also attests asynchronously a group of IoT devices, without interrupting the regular operations of all the devices at the same time. Third, this thesis proposes a new approach that aims to reduce the interruption time of the regular work that remote attestation introduces in an IoT device. This approach intends to decrease the computational overhead of attestation by allowing an IoT device to securely offload the attestation process to a cloud service, which then performs attestation independently on the cloud, on behalf of the IoT device