Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Reuse potential assessment framework for gamification-based smart city pilots

The paper proposes a unified framework for assessing the re-use potential for the Smart Engagement Pilot currently being realized in the city of Ghent (Belgium). The pilot aims to stimulate the digital engagement in users (citizens) by involving them in online and offline communities, and increasing the social capital through the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technology). To engage the citizens, the pilot makes use of Gamification based entities (intelligent wireless sensors) embedded in public hardware, through which innovative games are organized in places of interest (neighbourhood, parks, schools, etc.). Once finished, this pilot will be re-used in other European cities under the context of CIP SMART IP project. Since, the success of a pilot in one city doesn't guarantee its success in the other, an objective socio-economic-organizational reuse assessment becomes critical. To do this assessment, we propose a framework, which uses a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) based scorecard to determine the roadblocks and battlefields that could deter such a transition

Stuck in Traffic (SiT) Attacks: A Framework for Identifying Stealthy Attacks that Cause Traffic Congestion

Recent advances in wireless technologies have enabled many new applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) such as collision avoidance, cooperative driving, congestion avoidance, and traffic optimization. Due to the vulnerable nature of wireless communication against interference and intentional jamming, ITS face new challenges to ensure the reliability and the safety of the overall system. In this paper, we expose a class of stealthy attacks -- Stuck in Traffic (SiT) attacks -- that aim to cause congestion by exploiting how drivers make decisions based on smart traffic signs. An attacker mounting a SiT attack solves a Markov Decision Process problem to find optimal/suboptimal attack policies in which he/she interferes with a well-chosen subset of signals that are based on the state of the system. We apply Approximate Policy Iteration (API) algorithms to derive potent attack policies. We evaluate their performance on a number of systems and compare them to other attack policies including random, myopic and DoS attack policies. The generated policies, albeit suboptimal, are shown to significantly outperform other attack policies as they maximize the expected cumulative reward from the standpoint of the attacker

A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks. The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page

Secure Hop-by-Hop Aggregation of End-to-End Concealed Data in Wireless Sensor Networks

In-network data aggregation is an essential technique in mission critical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for achieving effective transmission and hence better power conservation. Common security protocols for aggregated WSNs are either hop-by-hop or end-to-end, each of which has its own encryption schemes considering different security primitives. End-to-end encrypted data aggregation protocols introduce maximum data secrecy with in-efficient data aggregation and more vulnerability to active attacks, while hop-by-hop data aggregation protocols introduce maximum data integrity with efficient data aggregation and more vulnerability to passive attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure aggregation protocol for aggregated WSNs deployed in hostile environments in which dual attack modes are present. Our proposed protocol is a blend of flexible data aggregation as in hop-by-hop protocols and optimal data confidentiality as in end-to-end protocols. Our protocol introduces an efficient O(1) heuristic for checking data integrity along with cost-effective heuristic-based divide and conquer attestation process which is $O(\ln{n})$ in average -O(n) in the worst scenario- for further verification of aggregated results