Vendor cybersecurity risk assessment is of critical importance to smart city infrastructure and sustainability of the autonomous mobility ecosystem. Lack of engagement in cybersecurity policies and process implementation by the tier companies providing hardware or services to OEMs within this ecosystem poses a significant risk to not only the individual companies but to the ecosystem overall. The proposed quantitative method of estimating cybersecurity risk allows vendors to have visibility to the financial risk associated with potential threats and to consequently allocate adequate resources to cybersecurity. It facilitates faster implementation of defense measures and provides a useful tool in the vendor selection process. The paper focuses on cybersecurity risk assessment as a critical part of the overall company mission to create a sustainable structure for maintaining cybersecurity health. Compound cybersecurity risk and impact on company operations as outputs of this quantitative analysis present a unique opportunity to strategically plan and make informed decisions towards acquiring a reputable position in a sustainable ecosystem. This method provides attack trees and assigns a risk factor to each vendor thus offering a competitive advantage and an insight into the supply chain risk map. This is an innovative way to look at vendor cybersecurity posture. Through a selection of unique industry specific parameters and a modular approach, this risk assessment model can be employed as a tool to navigate the supply base and prevent significant financial cost. It generates synergies within the connected vehicle ecosystem leading to a safe and sustainable economy.
Authored by Albena Tzoneva, Galina Momcheva, Borislav Stoyanov
The power industrial control system is an important part of the national critical Information infrastructure. Its security is related to the national strategic security and has become an important target of cyber attacks. In order to solve the problem that the vulnerability detection technology of power industrial control system cannot meet the requirement of non-destructive, this paper proposes an industrial control vulnerability analysis technology combined with dynamic and static analysis technology. On this basis, an industrial control non-destructive vulnerability detection system is designed, and a simulation verification platform is built to verify the effectiveness of the industrial control non-destructive vulnerability detection system. These provide technical support for the safety protection research of the power industrial control system.
Authored by Zhenwan Zou, Jun Yin, Ling Yang, Cheng Luo, Jiaxuan Fei
The Domain Name System (DNS) is critical to Internet communications. EDNS Client Subnet (ECS), a DNS extension, allows recursive resolvers to include client subnet information in DNS queries to improve CDN end-user mapping, extending the visibility of client information to a broader range. Major content delivery network (CDN) vendors, content providers (CP), and public DNS service providers (PDNS) are accelerating their IPv6 infrastructure development. With the increasing deployment of IPv6-enabled services and DNS being the most foundational system of the Internet, it becomes important to analyze the behavioral and privacy status of IPv6 resolvers. However, there is a lack of research on ECS for IPv6 DNS resolvers.In this paper, we study the ECS deployment and compliance status of IPv6 resolvers. Our measurement shows that 11.12% IPv6 open resolvers implement ECS. We discuss abnormal noncompliant scenarios that exist in both IPv6 and IPv4 that raise privacy and performance issues. Additionally, we measured if the sacrifice of clients’ privacy can enhance IPv6 CDN performance. We find that in some cases ECS helps end-user mapping but with an unnecessary privacy loss. And even worse, the exposure of client address information can sometimes backfire, which deserves attention from both Internet users and PDNSes.
Authored by Leyao Nie, Lin He, Guanglei Song, Hao Gao, Chenglong Li, Zhiliang Wang, Jiahai Yang
In recent decennium, hardware security has gained a lot of attention due to different types of attacks being launched, such as IP theft, reverse engineering, counterfeiting, etc. The critical testing infrastructure incorporated into ICs is very popular among attackers to mount side-channel attacks. The IEEE standard 1687 (IJTAG) is one such testing infrastructure that is the focus of attackers these days. To secure access to the IJTAG network, various techniques based on Locking SIB (LSIB) have been proposed. One such very effective technique makes use of Security Linear Feedback Shift Register (SLFSR) along with LSIB. The SLFSR obfuscates the scan chain information from the attacker and hence makes the brute-force attack against LSIB ineffective.In this work, it is shown that the SLFSR based Locking SIB is vulnerable to side-channel attacks. A power analysis attack along with known-plaintext attack is used to determine the IJTAG network structure. First, the known-plaintext attack is used to retrieve the SLFSR design information. This information is further used along with power analysis attack to determine the exact length of the scan chain which in turn breaks the whole security scheme. Further, a countermeasure is proposed to prevent the aforementioned hybrid attack.
Authored by Gaurav Kumar, Anjum Riaz, Yamuna Prasad, Satyadev Ahlawat
Resilience of urban infrastructure to sudden, system-wide, potentially catastrophic events is a critical need across domains. The growing connectivity of infrastructure, including its cyber-physical components which can be controlled in real time, offers an attractive path towards rapid adaptation to adverse events and adjustment of system objectives. However, existing work in the field often offers disjoint approaches that respond to particular scenarios. On the other hand, abstract work on control of complex systems focuses on attempting to adapt to the changes in the system dynamics or environment, but without understanding that the system may simply not be able to perform its original task after an adverse event. To address this challenge, this programmatic paper proposes a vision for a new paradigm of infrastructure resilience. Such a framework treats infrastructure across domains through a unified theory of controlled dynamical systems, but remains cognizant of the lack of knowledge about the system following a widespread adverse event and aims to identify the system's fundamental limits. As a result, it will enable the infrastructure operator to assess and assure system performance following an adverse event, even if the exact nature of the event is not yet known. Building off ongoing work on assured resilience of control systems, in this paper we identify promising early results, challenges that motivate the development of resilience theory for infrastructure system, and possible paths forward for the proposed effort.
Authored by Melkior Ornik, Jean-Baptiste Bouvier
Modern day cyber-infrastructures are critically dependent on each other to provide essential services. Current frameworks typically focus on the risk analysis of an isolated infrastructure. Evaluation of potential disruptions taking the heterogeneous cyber-infrastructures is vital to note the cascading disruption vectors and determine the appropriate interventions to limit the damaging impact. This paper presents a cyber-security risk assessment framework for the interconnected cyber-infrastructures. Our methodology is designed to be comprehensive in terms of accommodating accidental incidents and malicious cyber threats. Technically, we model the functional dependencies between the different architectures using reliability block diagrams (RBDs). RBDs are convenient, yet powerful graphical diagrams, which succinctly describe the functional dependence between the system components. The analysis begins by selecting a service from the many services that are outputted by the synchronized operation of the architectures whose disruption is deemed critical. For this service, we design an attack fault tree (AFT). AFT is a recent graphical formalism that combines the two popular formalisms of attack trees and fault trees. We quantify the attack-fault tree and compute the risk metrics - the probability of a disruption and the damaging impact. For this purpose, we utilize the open source ADTool. We show the efficacy of our framework with an example outage incident.
Authored by Rajesh Kumar
The damage or destruction of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) affect societies’ sustainable functioning. Therefore, it is crucial to have effective methods to assess the risk and resilience of CIs. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) are two approaches to risk assessment and criticality analysis. However, these approaches are complex to apply to intricate CIs and associated Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). We provide a top-down strategy, starting from a high abstraction level of the system and progressing to cover the functional elements of the infrastructures. This approach develops from FMECA but estimates risks and focuses on assessing resilience. We applied the proposed technique to a real-world CI, predicting how possible improvement scenarios may influence the overall system resilience. The results show the effectiveness of our approach in benchmarking the CI resilience, providing a cost-effective way to evaluate plausible alternatives concerning the improvement of preventive measures.
Authored by Gonçalo Carvalho, Nadia Medeiros, Henrique Madeira, Bruno Cabral
Cyber-Physical Power System (CPPS) is one of the most critical infrastructure systems due to deep integration between power grids and communication networks. In the power system, cascading failure is spreading more readily in CPPS, even leading to blackouts as well as there are new difficulties with the power system security simulation and faults brought by physical harm or network intrusions. The current study summarized the cross- integration of several fields such as computer and cyberspace security in terms of the robustness of Cyber-Physical Systems, viewed as Interconnected and secure network systems. Therefore, the security events that significantly influenced the power system were evaluated in this study, besides the challenges and future directions of power system security simulation technologies were investigated for posing both challenges and opportunities for simulation techniques of power system security like building a new power system to accelerate the transformation of the existing energy system to a clean, low-carbon, safe, and efficient energy system which is used to assure power system stability through fusion systems that combine the cyber-physical to integrate the battery power station, power generation and renewable energy resources through the internet with the cyber system that contains Smart energy system control and attacks.
Authored by Ahmed AL-Jumaili, Ravie Muniyandi, Mohammad Hasan, Mandeep Singh, Johnny Paw