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Smart Grid Computers Susceptible To Worm Attack
narramissic writes "Researchers with security consultancy IOActive have created a worm that could quickly spread among Smart Grid devices, small computers connected to the power grid that give customers and power companies better control over the electricity they use. '[The worm] spread from one meter to another and then it changed the text in the LCD screen to say "pwned,"' said Travis Goodspeed, an independent security consultant who worked with the IOActive team. In the hands of a malicious hacker, this code could be used to cut power to Smart Grid devices that use a feature called 'remote disconnect,' which allows power companies to cut a customer's power via the network. The robustness of US power networks has been a hot-button issue after a technical glitch in 2003 caused a cascading power failure in the eastern United States and Canada that affected 55 million people."
I know about these.... they're running windows XP, and are on modems. They call in every now and then to get get updates from the main network.... its' the power grid from the future? More like 1990.
It wasn't a glitch, it was negligence! Cheap cost cutting measures, enabled by foolish deregulation: Trees were not trimmed around critical power lines, the lines were cut by falling branches, and then a cascading failure spread through the grid.
You can't take the sky from me...
This demonstrates the weakness of centralized power grids, like big hydro, big nukes, big coal, big solar arrays beaming power down to Earth, Big solar arrays covering the desert, or any other huge centralized 'answer' to our power generation problems. They are all vulnerable to DOS attacks or attacks on central points of weakness like power lines. It takes just one well crafted weapon, whether kinetic, EMP, radiological, chemical-explosive, cyber-viral-worm, etc., to plunge large populations into darkness and chaos.
Monolithic thinking leads to monolithic engineering, (not to mention monolithic politics), that concentrate your vulnerabilities and limit your flexibility in responding to problems.
Better to have many smaller, locally distributed sources. They make it far more difficult to attack them. Looks like Edison was right and Westinghouse was wrong. At least partially. Too bad we went with Westinghouse, at least so far as the centralized generator is concerned.
This is a challenge that evolution, free markets and democracy all respond to with good answers. Authoritarian structures like organized religions, socialism/communism and autocracy in general all respond poorly to.
This is also a vulnerability of the Internet, with its centralized DNS name servers. I wish I was knowledgeable enough to come up with a solution to that one.
This is non-news.
There is no single "Smart Grid" device technology. At present there are many proprietary solutions from many different vendors, each using different communication protocols, computer hardware and firmware, and security methods. Each one of these vendors has its products in a very, very small fraction of the utility meters in the nation, most of which, of course, have no Smart technology at all. So the fact that these guys found one architecture vulnerable to a particular stack-overflow attack is bad for the vendor(s) that use it, but not indicative of an approacing nationwide catastrophe.
Smart Grid system standards are under development, however, and those doing the development are exceedingly aware of the need for high security. The IEEE, for example, recently started a Smart Grid standardization effort, P2030, and the IEEE 802.15.4g Smart Utility Neighborhood Task Group effort is already underway. Since the utilities lose revenue -- potentially all revenue, plus destruction of capital assets -- if their equipment is cracked, they are very much a part of these standard development activities, and security is of constant concern. (There will undoubtedly be an industry consortium tasked with reviewing implementations of these standards.)
The attack in question is a side-channel attack that is limited to using a microcontroller with an external 802.15.4 radio that includes an encryption engine. The actual AES-128 algorithm wasn't broken. Instead the vulnerability is that the AES keys are sniffed on the exposed bus when you load the keys into the radio's registers. Contrary to popular belief, you can't take over the nation's smart grid from this attack, and it would be difficult to even take over your neighbor's meter unless you broke into his house. I have more info on my site where I respond to the hack from Travis Goodspeed. The blog post is at http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/Clearing-the-Air-About-Hacking-Into-The-Smart-Grid.html
Akiba
FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Project
http://www.freaklabs.org/
I hadn't been aware that "remote disconnect" was being incorporated into electric meters. Read this industry analysis of remote disconnect" for background. The "risk items" list doesn't even consider the implications of hostile attack.
The purpose of "remote disconnect" is to get more control over customers. Utilities are considering using this to enforce collection, and even for prepaid electric service. It's another way to tighten the screws on poor people, like prepaid cellular and paycheck loans.
There's another feature, current limiting - draw too much current and the power cuts off. The current limit can be set remotely. When someone gets behind on their bill, the power they can use is limited to survival levels until they pay up.
Vulnerabilities in the remote management system could be a serious problem. Will the keys be kept in a Microsoft system? If you thought it was bad when credit card numbers were stolen, what happens when someone steals the meter key database? The meters have to be physically visited, one at a time, to reset the keys. And who would do that? The meter readers get laid off when this goes in.