Biblio

Wear and tear are essential in establishing the market value of an asset. From shutter counters on DSLRs to odometers inside cars, specific counters, that encode the degree of wear, exist on most products. But malicious modification of the information that they report was always a concern. Our work explores a solution to this problem by using the blockchain technology, a layered encoding of product attributes and identity-based cryptography. Merging such technologies is essential since blockchains facilitate the construction of a distributed database that is resilient to adversarial modifications, while identity-based signatures set room for a more convenient way to check the correctness of the reported values based on the name of the product and pseudonym of the owner alone. Nonetheless, we reinforce security by using ownership cards deployed around NFC tokens. Since odometer fraud is still a major practical concern, we discuss a practical scenario centered on vehicles, but the framework can be easily extended to many other assets.

Security is a vital aspect of industrial control systems since they are used in critical infrastructures and manufacturing processes. As demonstrated by the increasing number of emerging exploits, securing such systems is still a challenge as the employed fieldbus technologies do not offer intrinsic support for basic security objectives. In this work we discuss some security aspects of DeviceNet, a communication protocol widely used for control applications especially in the North American industrial sector. Having the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol at its base, DeviceNet inherits all the vulnerabilities that were already illustrated on CAN in-vehicle communication. We discuss how the lack of security in DeviceNet can be exploited and point on the fact that these vulnerabilities can be modelled by existing formal verification tools and countermeasures can be put in place.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is still the most widely employed bus in the automotive sector. Its lack of security mechanisms led to a high number of attacks and consequently several security countermeasures were proposed, i.e., authentication protocols or intrusion detection mechanisms. We discuss vulnerabilities of the CAN data link layer that can be triggered from the application level with the use of an off the shelf CAN transceiver. Namely, due to the wired-AND design of the CAN bus, dominant bits will always overwrite recessive ones, a functionality normally used to assure priority for frames with low value identifiers. We exploit this characteristic and show Denial of Service attacks both on senders and receivers based on bit injections by using bit banging to maliciously control the CAN transceiver. We demonstrate the effects and limitations of such attacks through experimental analysis and discuss possible countermeasures. In particular, these attacks may have high impact on centralized authentication mechanisms that were frequently proposed in the literature since these attacks can place monitoring nodes in a bus-off state for certain periods of time.