Biblio
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.
Cloud computing has become a widely used computing paradigm providing on-demand computing and storage capabilities based on pay-as-you-go model. Recently, many organizations, especially in the field of big data, have been adopting the cloud model to perform data analytics through leasing powerful Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs can be attractive targets to attackers as well as untrusted cloud providers who aim to get unauthorized access to the business critical-data. The obvious security solution is to perform data analytics on encrypted data through the use of cryptographic keys as that of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). However, it is very easy to obtain AES cryptographic keys from the VM's Random Access Memory (RAM). In this paper, we present a novel key-scattering (KS) approach to protect the cryptographic keys while encrypting/decrypting data. Our solution is highly portable and interoperable. Thus, it could be integrated within today's existing cloud architecture without the need for further modifications. The feasibility of the approach has been proven by implementing a functioning prototype. The evaluation results show that our approach is substantially more resilient to brute force attacks and key extraction tools than the standard AES algorithm, with acceptable execution time.