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2020-02-26
Tychalas, Dimitrios, Keliris, Anastasis, Maniatakos, Michail.  2019.  LED Alert: Supply Chain Threats for Stealthy Data Exfiltration in Industrial Control Systems. 2019 IEEE 25th International Symposium on On-Line Testing and Robust System Design (IOLTS). :194–199.

Industrial Internet-of-Things has been touted as the next revolution in the industrial domain, offering interconnectivity, independence, real-time operation, and self-optimization. Integration of smart systems, however, bridges the gap between information and operation technology, creating new avenues for attacks from the cyber domain. The dismantling of this air-gap, in conjunction with the devices' long lifespan -in the range of 20-30 years-, motivates us to bring the attention of the community to emerging advanced persistent threats. We demonstrate a threat that bridges the air-gap by leaking data from memory to analog peripherals through Direct Memory Access (DMA), delivered as a firmware modification through the supply chain. The attack automatically adapts to a target device by leveraging the Device Tree and resides solely in the peripherals, completely transparent to the main CPU, by judiciously short-circuiting specific components. We implement this attack on a commercial Programmable Logic Controller, leaking information over the available LEDs. We evaluate the presented attack vector in terms of stealthiness, and demonstrate no observable overhead on both CPU performance and DMA transfer speed. Since traditional anomaly detection techniques would fail to detect this firmware trojan, this work highlights the need for industrial control system-appropriate techniques that can be applied promptly to installed devices.

2020-01-20
Elaguech, Amira, Kchaou, Afef, El Hadj Youssef, Wajih, Ben Othman, Kamel, Machhout, Mohsen.  2019.  Performance evaluation of lightweight Block Ciphers in soft-core processor. 2019 19th International Conference on Sciences and Techniques of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering (STA). :101–105.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and RFID devices are essential parts of the new information technology generation. They are mostly characterized by their limited power and computing resources. In order to ensure their security under computing and power constraints, a number of lightweight cryptography algorithms has emerged. This paper outlines the performance analysis of six lightweight blocks crypto ciphers with different structures - LED, PRESENT, HIGHT, LBlock, PICCOLO and TWINE on a LEON3 open source processor. We have implemented these crypto ciphers on the FPGA board using the C language and the LEON3 processor. Analysis of these crypto ciphers is evaluated after considering various benchmark parameters like throughput, execution time, CPU performance, AHB bandwidth, Simulator performance, and speed. These metrics are tested with different key sizes provided by each crypto algorithm.