Biblio
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) enabled a new class of smart and interactive devices. With their continuous connectivity and their access to valuable information in both the digital and physical world, they are attractive targets for security attackers. Hence, with their integration into both the industry and consumer devices, they added a new surface for cybersecurity attacks. These potential threats call for special care of security vulnerabilities during the design of IoT devices and CPS. The design of secure systems is a complex task, especially if they must adhere to other constraints, such as performance, power consumption, and others. A range of design space exploration tools have been proposed in academics, which aim to support system designers in their task of finding the optimal selection of hardware components and task mappings. Said tools offer a limited way of modeling attack scenarios as constraints for a system under design. The framework proposed in this paper aims at closing this gap, offering system designers a way to consider security attacks and security risks during the early design phase. It offers designers to model security constraints from the view of potential attackers, assessing the probability of successful security attacks and security risk. The framework's feasibility and performance is demonstrated by revisiting a potential system design of an industry partner.
The importance of Networked Control Systems (NCS) is steadily increasing due to recent trends such as smart factories. Correct functionality of such NCS needs to be protected as malfunctioning systems could have severe consequences for the controlled process or even threaten human lives. However, with the increase in NCS, also attacks targeting these systems are becoming more frequent. To mitigate attacks that utilize captured sensor data in an NCS, transferred data needs to be protected. While using well-known methods such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) might be suitable to protect the data, resource constraint devices such as sensors often are not powerful enough to perform the necessary cryptographic operations. Also, as we will show in this paper, applying simple encryption in an NCS may enable easy Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks by attacking single bits of the encrypted data. Therefore, in this paper, we present a hardware-based approach that enables sensors to perform the necessary encryption while being robust against (injected) bit failures.
In smart factories and smart homes, devices such as smart sensors are connected to the Internet. Independent of the context in which such a smart sensor is deployed, the possibility to change its configuration parameters in a secure way is essential. Existing solutions do provide only minimal security or do not allow to transfer arbitrary configuration data. In this paper, we present an NFC- and QR-code based configuration interface for smart sensors which improves the security and practicability of the configuration altering process while introducing as little overhead as possible. We present a protocol for configuration as well as a hardware extension including a dedicated security controller (SC) for smart sensors. For customers, no additional hardware other than a commercially available smartphone will be necessary which makes the proposed approach highly applicable for smart factory and smart home contexts alike.