BROOKLYN, N.Y., July 27, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --
Cyberattacks against power grids and other critical infrastructure
systems have long been considered a threat limited to nation-states
due to the sophistication and resources necessary to mount them.
Today, at the Black Hat USA 2017
conference in Las Vegas, a team of
New York University researchers will
challenge that notion by disclosing vulnerabilities in a component
that combined with publicly available information provide
sufficient information to model an advanced, persistent threat to
the electrical grid.
Michail Maniatakos, a research professor at the NYU Tandon
School of Engineering and an assistant professor of electrical and
computer engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi, will detail the discovery of
a security flaw in the authentication mechanism of a legacy
protective relay — a component that responds to changes in flow
across the grid to isolate electrical faults. The vulnerability
allows an attacker with local or remote access to extract and
reverse-engineer the weakly encrypted and easily accessed passwords
used to reprogram the relay's protective setpoints.
Maniatakos and his collaborators also will demonstrate how
information about network topology and grid components may allow
adversaries to create a model of the power system — information
that can be used to pinpoint the most critical nodes of the system.
Examples:
- Some local energy commission meetings, disclosing critical
power usage information, are available on YouTube.
- Equipment suppliers market the sale of their critical equipment
online, alerting potential adversaries to where their equipment is
used.
- The researchers were able to use Google Earth to track power
lines.
- The team was able to purchase the relay on eBay for about
$1,000, and other equipment critical
to the grid is also publicly available.
"It is essential that at each step, the energy industry
considers the implications of their communication – disclosing
information for the right reasons," Maniatakos said. "Some
regulatory changes are clearly needed: We should never have been
able to inexpensively purchase equipment critical to the power
grid. But one of the most important lessons this study delivers is
that cybersecurity must not be regarded as a simple issue of
complying with regulations. It must be viewed as an integral
element of design and operation."
As utilities modernize and upgrade their systems, they need to
address the security of components that were manufactured and
installed years or even decades ago – a difficult challenge because
bad actors search daily for vulnerabilities, he explained.
The NYU researchers worked closely
with GE, the manufacturer of the Multilin relay series, to release
a patch to secure the vulnerability shortly after the NYU team disclosed the flaw to the company in 2016;
they made only some of their findings public at Black Hat 2017 so
that utilities and GE would have time to implement fixes. Their
research is based on experiments in a laboratory setting, and their
published findings neither instruct nor detail successful
strategies for attacking existing infrastructure systems.
Rather, the work highlights how such software vulnerabilities,
along with publicly available yet sensitive information about the
power grid, increases the potential for infrastructure attacks.
In addition to Maniatakos, the research team contributing to the
Black Hat presentation includes NYU Tandon doctoral students
Anastasis Keliris and Charalambos
Konstantinou. Their findings will be published by Black Hat
in a paper entitled GE Multilin SR Protective Relays Passcode
Vulnerability. ICS-CERT (Industrial Control Systems Cyber
Emergency Response Team), the U.S. cyber emergency response team,
published the NYU-GE coordinated disclosure in April 2017.
NYU researchers have been working
with stakeholders around the world to increase the security of the
power grid. In one example, Maniatakos plans to continue his
research using a new smart-city testbed being developed by the
Center for Cyber Security at New York
University Abu Dhabi. It will provide a realistic and
real-time environment for researchers to perform security
evaluations on equipment. It consists of security-sensitive and
potentially vulnerable devices like control systems (such as
programmable logic controllers – PLCs), smart grid devices, smart
sensors/actuators used in intelligent buildings and houses,
environmental sensors, networking devices/gateways, and a local
server that acts as an Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform. The
devices are deployed in Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations,
using software elements and mathematical models suitable for each
application. All of the devices are interconnected and exchange
data through the testbed's networking infrastructure, and they are
monitored and controlled by an IoT platform.
The researchers are part of the small and increasingly
influential group of cybersecurity researchers at NYU exploring hardware trustworthiness and
educating experts worldwide about their findings. Under the aegis
of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, faculty and student
researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Tandon are recognized as
leaders in research on secure chip design and production, microchip
camouflaging, encryption, crowd sourcing and sharing of attack and
defense strategies, and improving the trustworthiness of the supply
chain.
About the NYU Tandon School of
Engineering
The NYU Tandon School of Engineering
dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and
Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute
(widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January
2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and
research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition
of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering
technology in service to society. In addition to its main location
in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon
collaborates with other schools within NYU, the country's largest private research
university, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU
Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on
start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate
program. For more information, visit
http://engineering.nyu.edu.
About NYU Abu Dhabi
NYU Abu Dhabi is the
first comprehensive liberal arts and science campus in the
Middle East to be operated abroad
by a major American research university. NYU Abu Dhabi has
integrated a highly-selective liberal arts, engineering and science
curriculum with a world center for advanced research and
scholarship enabling its students to succeed in an increasingly
interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on
humanity's shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi's high-achieving
students have come from 110 nations and speak over 100 languages.
Together, NYU's campuses in
New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global
university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience
varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one
or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.
www.facebook.com/nyutandon
@NYUTandon
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