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Is Analog the Fix For Cyber Terrorism?
chicksdaddy writes "The Security Ledger has picked up on an opinion piece by noted cyber terrorism and Stuxnet expert Ralph Langner (@langnergroup) who argues in a blog post that critical infrastructure owners should consider implementing what he calls 'analog hard stops' to cyber attacks. Langner cautions against the wholesale embrace of digital systems by stating the obvious: that 'every digital system has a vulnerability,' and that it's nearly impossible to rule out the possibility that potentially harmful vulnerabilities won't be discovered during the design and testing phase of a digital ICS product. ... For example, many nuclear power plants still rely on what is considered 'outdated' analog reactor protection systems. While that is a concern (maintaining those systems and finding engineers to operate them is increasingly difficult), the analog protection systems have one big advantage over their digital successors: they are immune against cyber attacks.
Rather than bowing to the inevitability of the digital revolution, the U.S. Government (and others) could offer support for (or at least openness to) analog components as a backstop to advanced cyber attacks could create the financial incentive for aging systems to be maintained and the engineering talent to run them to be nurtured, Langner suggests." Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet.
Rather than bowing to the inevitability of the digital revolution, the U.S. Government (and others) could offer support for (or at least openness to) analog components as a backstop to advanced cyber attacks could create the financial incentive for aging systems to be maintained and the engineering talent to run them to be nurtured, Langner suggests." Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet.
the terrorists are like cylons and we need to disconnect all networked computers for humanity!!!
>Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet
said the person volunteering to get up at 3 am to go to the office to reset the a/c system.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
ever been compromised :) Physical kill switches, human operated are not simply analog (one might argue they are digital at the switch level). Analog might be the wrong word, since analog systems have been repeatedly compromised (from macrovision, to phreaking boxes, etc, etc). keep it off a communications network, even off local networks if they are uber critical.
"Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet."
Wasn't Stuxnet partially a sneakernet operation? I can't imagine Iran being so stupid to connect secret centrifuges to the internet.
The only way to win is not to play.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Digial, analog, trinary, HIKE! You won't safe them without MIKE!
In other words children it's all the humans who're messing up your security chain.
You need better, faster, stronger, smarter people who have a driving need to make your security better from the floor sweep to the ablative meat.
Without it you're just asking for an ass raping.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Didn't Stuxnet target centrifuge controllers that were (designed/thought to be) isolated from the internet?
Iran's centrifuge operation was physically isolated from the Internet. The Americans and/or Israelis broke through via a USB drive. They infected the machines of individuals related to the project and waited until somebody used a USB drive to transfer data. Oops.
If it's digital and not shut-off, it can be hacked remotely.
It is called self-secure systems. They have limiters, designed-in limitations and regulators in there that do not permit the systems to blow themselves up and there is no bypass for them (except going there in person and starting to get physical). This paradigm is centuries old and taught in every halfway reasonable engineering curriculum. That this even needs to be brought up shows that IT and CS do not qualify as engineering disciplines at this time. My guess would be that people have been exceedingly stupid, e.g. by putting the limiters in software in SCADA systems. When I asked my EE student class (bachelor level) what they though about that, their immediate response was that this is stupid. Apparently CS types are still ignoring well-established knowledge.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, sure disconnect critial systems from a network, no brainer right? They don't because the systems allow one remote operator to control what it took hundreds of employees to do/monitor previously.
A product is made in America, it costs $5 to make, and they sold it for $10(or more). China opens up, can make the same product there for $0.05 each, they import it and sell it for $10(or more) making incredible profits... This works for years(80-90s), anything that can be 'exported' is. Years later, inflation and a dwindling middle-class the price come down through 3rd parties bringing in the same products and selling for less than $10 each. China now controls all manufacturing for the products, instead of us setting terms on deadlines, they do, they increase prices...So we have a nation that makes very little, w/o majority of the jobs not actually doing anything but killing time(move vapor around). The rich sill get rich tho, so all is fine, go about your business, don't vote for a 3rd party candidate or anything, your happy, have some bread, enjoy the clowns.
analog is actually more suceptable to interference generated by rather simple devices, as there is no error checking on whats being fed to the system
the problem is your reactor is for some fucking reason hooked to the same network as facebook and twitter
Fred Flintstone never had unexpected brake failures...at least none without a known cause.
Table-ized A.I.
There's a lot to be said for this. Formal analysis of analog systems is possible.The F-16 flight control system is an elegant analog system.
Full authority digital flight control systems made a lot of people nervous. The Airbus has them, and not only do they have redundant computers, they have a second system cross-checking them which is running on a different kind of CPU, with code written in a different language, written by different people working at a different location. You need that kind of paranoia in life-critical systems.
We're now seeing web-grade programmers writing hardware control systems. That's not good. Hacks have been demonstrated where car "infotainment" systems have been penetrated and used to take over the ABS braking system. Read the papers from the latest Defcon.
If you have to do this stuff, learn how it's done for avionics, railroad signalling, and traffic lights. In good systems, there are special purpose devices checking what the general purpose ones are doing. For example, most traffic light controllers have a hard-wired hardware conflict checker. If it detects two green signals enabled on conflicting routes, the whole controller is forcibly shut down and a dumb "blinking red" device takes over. The conflict checker is programmed by putting jumpers onto a removable PC board. (See p. 14 of that document.) It cannot be altered remotely.
That's the kind of logic needed in life-critical systems.
Unkown Lamer has it.
tl;dr - using analog in security situations would be obvious if "computer security" wasn't so tangled in abstractions
Sure someone may point out that the "air gap" was overcome by BadBios http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... but that requires multiple computers with speakers and microphones connected to an infected system
IMHO computer security (and law enforcement/corrections) has been reduced to hitting a "risk assessment" number, which has given us both a false sense of security & a misperception of how our data is vulnerable to attack
100% of computers connected to the internet are vulnerable...just like 100% of lost laptops with credit card data are vulnerable
Any system can have a "vulnerability map" illustrating nodes in the system & how they can be comprimised. I imagine it like a Physical Network Topology map for IT networking only with more types of nodes.
This is where the "risk assessment" model becomes reductive...they use statistics & infer causality...the statistics they use are historical data & they use voodoo data analysis to find **correlations** then produce a "risk assessment" number from any number of variables.
If I'm right, we can map every possible security incursion in a tree/network topology. For each node of possible incursion, we can identify every possible vulnerability. If we can do this, we can have alot more certainty than an abstract "risk assessment" value.
Analog comes into play thusly: if you use my theory, using **analog electronics** jumps out as a very secure option against "cyber" intrusions. Should be obvious!
"computer security"....
Thank you Dave Raggett
Analog vs. digital, fully connected vs less connected - all can fail in similar ways. If it's really critical, like nuclear power plant critical, use simple, basic physics. The simpler the better.
You need to protect against excessive pressure rupturing a tank. Do you use a digital pressure sensor or an analog one? Use either, but how also add a blowout disc made of metal 1/4th as thick as the rest of the tank. An analog sensor may fail. A digital sensor may fail. A piece of thin, weak material is guaranteed to rupture when the pressure gets to high.
Monitoring temperature in a life safety application? Pick analog or digital sensors, ei ther one, but you better have something simple like the vials used in fire sprinklers, or a wax piece that melts, something simple as hell based on physics. Ethanol WILL boil and wax WILL melt before it gets to be 300 F. That's guaranteed, everytime.
New nuclear reactor designs do that. If the core gets to hot, something melts and it falls into a big pool of water. Gravity is going to keep working when all of the sophisticated electronics doesn't work because "you're not holding it right".
Such systems are not insecure because they are digital or involve computers or anything. (seriously I doubt the guy even understands what digital and analog means) Such systems are insecure because they are unnecessarily complex.
Let's take the Stuxnet example. That system designed to control and monitor the speed at which centrifuges spin. That's not really a complex task. That's something you should be able to solve in much less than a thousand lines of code. However the system they built had a lot of unnecessary features. For example if you inserted an USB stick (why did it have USB support) it displayed icons for some of the files. And those icons can be in DLLs where the stub code gets executed when you load them. So you insert an USB stick and the system will execute code from it... just like it's advertised in the manual. Other features include remote printing to file, so you can print to a file on a remote computer, or storing configuration files in an SQL database, obviously with a hard coded password.
Those systems are unfortunately done by people who don't understand what they are doing. They use complex systems, but have no idea how they work. And instead of making their systems simpler, they actually make them more and more complex. Just google for "SCADA in the Cloud" and read all the justifications for it.
There are plenty of secure digital systems. Its not hard to make them, intact its quite easy. Trivial non networked systems are often secure. There is no need to go to analog, simple digital circuits are fine. I don't care how good your leet hacking skills are, I can make a single digital control system thats perfectly secure that sets line C high in line A and B are high. You can't hack an AND gate. There are plenty of places one can use provably correct digital control systems.
The idea is not that you need to put "Analog" in there somewhere, but rather that you should have simple things that are easy to secure, and design such that they are in the critical path for attacking. Ex: the Linux kernel is rather large (~15 million LOC). While its nice, you don't really want to rely on all that being secure. If you want security, you reduce the surface area exposed to attackers. If you are worried about incoming attacks over the network, air-gap = 0 area to attack. If you still need to allow come input, you can squeeze the threat through something simple which could be some analog mess as implied by the article, but more realistically would be a simple digital system, either hardware, or carefully validated (trivial) software, or both.
If you are willing to expose a bit more and get a real general purpose OS, you can opt for something like genode thats much more practical to design secure software for, and to validate the security of the OS itself.
TFA seems to be advocating using analog control systems to avoid things like cross site scripting attacks. Maybe drop the "site" and "scripting" before dropping the idea of digital control systems. If you don't care about putting your junk on the internet, and air gap will fix most of that crap, and if you do want it on the internet, too bad, IP is a digital protocol, and the analog version won't be able to work with it. Besides, those attacks are client side, so maybe just not exposing important infrastructure controls capable of wrecking everything if messed with to people using web browsers to edit them in a non-secure environment is enough.
Just last week, I saw this man speak at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He had given his whole presentation, and at the end someone had asked him if analog systems could be an answer to protecting critical infrastructure. His response was that yes, it would help, but nobody wants "that old shit" (in this case he was paraphrasing what he feels the industry thinks of analog systems). He also asserted that the main reason that digital systems were popular and on the internet was because companies were focused on the cost savings of having remote access to these systems.
Reminds me a bit of one of the tropes from battlestar galactica. Adama knew from the previous war that the cylons where master hackers and could disable battlestars by breaking into networks via wireless and then using them to disable the whole ship, leaving them effectively dead in the water, so he simply ordered that none of his ship ever be networked and that the ship be driven using manual control. Later on they meet the other surviving battleship, the pegasus, and it turns out that only survived because its network was offline due to maintainance. Its not actually a novel idea in militaries. I remember in the 90s doing a small contract for a special forces group I can't name, and asked them about their computer network. He said they used "Sneaker-net", which is that any info that needed transfer was put on a floppy and walked to its destination, thus creating an air gap between battlefield systems.
I guess this isn't quite that, but it certainly seems to be a sort of variant of it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
In other words, it is nothing to do with analog vs digital, but about having failsafe mechanisms that contain the damage when all your control systems go wrong. Failsafe mechanisms tend to be "analog", as they need to be effective even when the electricity and anything else that can fail has failed.
Editor or submitter said
isolate control systems from the Internet.
Stuxnet has shown that it is not enough. You can still be infected by an USB key.
Analog vs digital has nothing to do with "cyberterrorism". Analog refers to systems with an infinite number of states, digital refers to systems with a finite number of states. If properly designed, both are perfectly safe.
Cyber security has nothing to do with digital or analog, and everything to do with software and networking. Which have nothing whatsoever to do with the analog vs digital design choices.
TFA reads like a science essay from a 3rd grader who write with technical words to look smart, but doesn't actually understand any of what they're writing about...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
>Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet.
Yes, maybe is the keyword there. Set up everything to be nice and air-gapped, and maybe some joker won't bring in his malware-infected laptop the next day and temporarily hook it up to your "secure network" in order to transfer a file over.
Or then again, maybe he will. Who knows?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The core problem is that "data" and "code" are being sent over the same path - the reporting data is being sent out, and the control "data" is being sent in, but it's over a two-way Internet connection. If you had an analog control system that was openly accessible in some way, you'd have the exact same problems. Or you could have a complete separate, non-public digital control connection that would be secure. But nobody wants to lay two sets of cable to one device, and there's a convenience factor in remote control. So since security doesn't sell products*, but low price and convenience features do, we got into our current situation. It's not "digital"'s fault. It's not "analog"'s fault. It probably would have happened even if all our long-range communication networks were built of hydraulics and springs.
* For those who are about to point out how much money antivirus software makes, that's fear selling, not security. Fear moves product *very* well.
Air-gap alone is not enough. Stuxnet travelled via USB sticks. And if your hardware (or anything connected to it) has a wireless interface on it (Bluetooth, Wifi, etc), you have a problem ... an operator might bring a hacked phone within range, for example.
Simplifying the hardware down to fixed-function IC or analog reduces the attack surface much more than attempts to isolate the hardware from the Internet.
these reactors would be run in a local environment you'd think. essentially away from cyberspace /.
The key is hard stop rather than analog. For a simple example, imagine 3 machines that draw a great deal of inrush current using typical start/stop controls. Since we're in the digital age, we put them under computer control. The controller can strobe the start or stop lines for the 3 machines.
Now, they must not all be started at once or they'll blow out everything back to the substation. We know they must be started 10 seconds apart at least. Doing it the "digital way" we program the delay into the controller software and call it good. Then someone hacks the firmware and does a great deal of damage power cycling the units rapidly until kaboom.
Or we do it the 'analog way'. When a start line is strobed, a PLC with no connectivity of any kind locks out the other two and starts a ten second timer. The firmware can't touch the timer. The attacker annoys but does no real damage due to the hard stop.
Whether it is a series of mechanical cogs or a digital controller problem in abstract seems not so much selection of technology as it is proliferation of "nice to have" yet possibly unnecessary capabilities.. widgets which may not offer significant value after closer inspection of all risks. Is remote management really a must have or can you live without? Perhaps read-only monitoring (cutting rx lines) is a good enough compromise... perhaps not all systems need network connections, active USB ports..etc
Then we get to process questions.. can system be designed and isolated in such a way any manipulation is subject to local safety constraints which cannot be remotely bypassed or influenced/tricked?
It is problematic control people have not sufficiently cared about security in terms of product development, deployment and operation.
Also at some level operators must be trusted to not be stupid or evil.... To some extent this means knowing when to ignore the security/bureaucratic guy endlessly pulling what-ifs and CYAs out of their asses and focus on what in the bigger context is actually important.
The hubris of some thinking that everything can be linked to the internet while maintaining acceptable security is ignorant.
Some systems need to be air gapped. And some core systems just need to be too simple to hack. I'm not saying analog. Merely so simple that we can actually say with certainty that there is no coding exploit. That means programs short enough that the code can be completely audited and made unhackable.
Between airgapping and keeping core systems too simple to hack... we'll be safe from complete infiltration.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"obvious: that 'every digital system has a vulnerability,' "
So far, this has been demonstrated (NOT proven) only in the current environment where hardware and software architects, developers and businesses can get away from product liability requirements by crafting toxic EULAs that dump all the responsibility for their crappy designs and code on the end user. If the people who create our digital systems had to face liability as a consequence of their failure to design a secure system, we may find they get off their a**es and do the job properly. Where's Ralph Nader when you need him?
And as the original poster noted, you CAN isolate the control systems from the Internet! Cut the wire and fire anyone who tries to fix it.
"analog protection systems have one big advantage over their digital successors: they are immune"
Nonsense! There were PLENTY of breakins by thieves into banks, runaway trains, industrial accidents and sabotage BEFORE the digital age. There was no "golden age" of analog before digital: That's just bullsh*t.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
It is not a analog or digital issue, it is a cost issue. To be secure from remote attack you have to be willing to pay to have trusted (human) individual with a sense of what is reasonable (with respect to the process) to be in the control loop. The problem is of course that trusted humans with a sense of reason are expensive.
No, it is not. If the remote analog access is by a dedicated wire (and that is what you do in analog), then the attacker has to have physical access to that wire. Come on, does not body know basic EE anymore? No wonder all this insecurity and stupidity happens... What this comment shows nicely is how incompetent CS types are routinely and how far they misunderstand the world.
Please don't associate your self-deluded angry mind with EE, it reflects poorly on the bulk of EE types who are more stable than you. If you understood the world, even a small amount, you might realize that physical access is no placebo. You might even realize that a man in the middle attack predates CS, by millennia. Analog systems have been compromised and will be compromised.
That's because CS is math, not engineering. Computer Engineering is engineering, Computer Science is the study of the mathematics of computer systems. CE is a lot rarer than CS though, so a lot of people with CS degrees try to be engineers, but aren't trained for it.
The difference between CS and CE is usually just the name the department chooses, not their course work. In other words it is usually a cosmetic difference.
There are billions of embedded systems out there, and most of them are not connected to the internet. I've designed embedded control systems for most of my career, and can attest to the many advantages a digital control system has over an analog one. Analog still has it's place (op-amps are pretty fast & cheap), but it's often quite useful to have a computer do it. Most capacitors have a 20% tolerance or so, have a temperature tolerance, and have values that drift. Your control system can drift over time, and may even become unstable due to the aging of the components in the compensator (e.g. PI, PID,lead/lag) .. Also a microcontroller wins hands down when it comes to long time constants with any kind of precision (millihertz). It's harder to make very long RC time constants, and trust those times. Microcontrollers/FPGA's are good for a wide control loops including those that are very fast or very very slow. Microcontrollers allow you to do things like adaptive control when you plant can vary over time like maintaining a precision temperature and ramp time of a blast-furnace when the volume inside can change wildly.. They also allow you to easily handle things like transport/phase lags, and a lot of corner conditions, system changes -- all without changing any hardware..
I am happy to see the same trend with software-defined radio, where we try to digitize as much of the radio as possible, as close to the antenna as possible.. Analog parts add noise, offsets, drift, cross-talk exhibit leakag,etc.. Microcontrollers allow us to minimize as much of the analog portion as possible.
Analog is a step backwards. We should be moving forward with digital security.
physical access is no placebo
I literally have no idea what this means. I've read it five times and still don't know.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Computer viruses predated the internet and worked across sneaker nets. Code on a floppy can be infected. A floppy can contain data crafted to overrun buffers and execute code, etc. The internet just simplifies the process, automates it.
This seems a bit redundant, there's already methods to mathematically prove digital systems from metal to software (although at the metal level, it gets quite time consuming).
The issue is people have critical infrastructure built on, or controlled by insecure systems (regardless of if it's digital or not).
As many have stated, isolation is the easiest first step - but you can go further, building on well define/restricted ASIC, built on mathematically proven macro kernels which give essential access via MAC (also mathematically provable, via the kernel & MAC manifests) to 'processes' (drivers, software, etc) built on mathematically provable languages.
A lot of functional languages (typically those who are strict implementations of lambda calculus w/ minor (if any) extensions based on a well known type system - which again in the FP domain is typically a Hindley Milner type system (or super/sub-set of)) can be proven mathematically to meet various constructs/restrictions, which in a strict macro kernel environment, and using drivers under identically strict process environments meet very high levels of security from both intrusion and correctness perspectives.
Some of this is even 'required' for various military contracts (personally, we use a subset of Java SE for military grade gun mounts & control systems for various national militaries around the world - and have an entire team of mathematicians/CS staff whose sole job is to validate correctness and prove system reliability from various standpoints, who do exactly this - albeit for a Java-like language, not an FP language).
If the cylons themselves are based on digital, they have the same vulnerabilities as any other digital lifeforms and are hackable.
... then the attacker has to have physical access to that wire ...
[requiring] physical access is no placebo
I literally have no idea what this means. I've read it five times and still don't know.
Sorry, typo, should have been "requiring physical access".
. ..
so the article speaks of a dedicated line when it speaks of "analog"? I don't think so(without reading the article). it just speaks of analog protection systems, like an analog temp fuse on fire suppression water lines.
(analog dedicated control line would be only as useful as both ends of the wire are secure.. making it about as useful as a digital line only transmitting a simple protocol handled with good code at both ends)
real analog control and protection systems aren't programmable and so less vulnerable to someone hacking the max RPM limit on some centrifuges etc, since the attacker would need to physically alter the control mechanisms/analog electronics to alter the rpm. obviously such systems are more demanding to operate too..
they are more expensive to do and more prone for faults though...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Is a piece of wax melting analog, or something else entirely?
'My time is a piece of wax falling on a termite, who's choking on the splinters'
A "cyber-attack" is a digital attack. So if your system is not digital, you can't be cyber-attacked. Great news.
I think I have a call from 1985 on line one, from some guy called 'Therac-25' who seems very excited about the importance of hardware safeguards and not trusting your software overmuch...
My sister-in law was excitedly showing off her new car to me, and I said that I didn't care for the idea of a remote-start function for cars. "But it's security coded." she said. My response was this:
If a device can be controlled with an electronic signal, that means that the device can be controlled with an electronic signal.
Sometimes that signal will come from where you want it to, but there can be no guarantee that it will not come from somewhere else.
If you have a critical system why not just put a fail-safe system in control of the actuators? I mean when I have a pump that is controlled over the internet via VPN I know that there is a chance that it can be hacked. But even if they turn it off the pump will still start if the water level reaches catastrophy levels. Sure you won't get any alarms and you won't be able to load balance it with any other pumps and you won't get a counter showing the hours utilized, but it will still work because there will be an electrical system or fail-safe PLC controlling it in the end overriding any stupid commands from the normal control PLC.
You seem to be unaware what "placebo" means. Maybe you have taken too many drugs and mean "panacea"?
Physical access has one characteristic: You need to be there to attack. That makes it expensive. You also need to know where "there" is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet."
Or maybe you could not build nuclear power plants in the first place. Fixed.
Same goes for connecting weapons systems to computer networks or any other number of dumb things we seem to be doing with technology.
when a cyclone/tornado/tsunami -whatever hit indonesia recently, it knocked out all the phone towers... hmmm no-one had ham radio anymore.
The problem is that modern digital systems have to many possibilities. You can not be certain that a security system with in field reprogramming abilities is safe.
It may be expensive (in both space and dollars) but critical systems should have safe limits embedded in the hardware. A powerplant should not be able to increase the output voltage without hardware modifications. A nuclear plant must fail safe, even if the software is hacked.
In essence you are right: It doesn't matter if those securities are in digital (relays for example) or analog (dunno how you'd do that). What matters is that they don't run software. However that is how digital vs analog is used these days. Language is fluid, it changes. What once was wrong now is correct. This has been forever, just analyze the word "regularly".
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Inherently safe design and mechanical safety systems are the final word you are absolutely correct, however in the digital vs analogue debate I would not be so quick to say use either. Digital systems have allowed a world of advanced diagnostics to be reported. Your pressure transmitter can now not only tell you what it thinks the pressure is, but it can also tell you if the tapping / impulse line is plugged. Your valve can report when it's near failure or if torque requirements are increasing, or stiction is occurring.
You shouldn't have to rely on inherently safe design. Your valve should report that it has a problem before it gets stuck and your rupture disc blows. The name of the game is LAYERS of protection, not just using mechanical protections as the last word.
And very very fast.
But they are NOT secure.
Analog computers are only as good as the mathematical model they implement - just as digital computers are.
They are subject to input failures in the same way.
They ALSO have a calibration failure that is worse than digital. As parts age, the calibration drifts...
Digital circuits just quit. Analog gives the wrong answer.
It's digital. It's either melted, or it's not.
"the analog protection systems have one big advantage over their digital successors: they are immune against cyber attacks."
Unfortunately they are not immune to idiotic engineers as we learned the hard way.
Then companies will need to pay these engineers too.
In other words, except for military stuff, this will never, ever happen. The golden age of electrical engineering is safe in the past.
Slashdot needs an official galacticawasntnetworked tag.
in our case ion implanters with high voltage, boiling oil, great whirling
blades and poisonous gasses, one rule of thumb was you needed
two completely non-computerized layers of safety beyond what the
control system provided. Relays were ok. Always seemed like a good
rule to me.
I suggested to Ralph that while replacing the analog protective relays at a critical missile defense power plant I discovered that the replacement digital relays made by General Electric were not cyber secure. I included cyber security precautions in the Operation & Maintenance Manuals and recommended periodic checks to verify that the relays were not connected to the internet. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence retained me to visit the site and report on the status. The Air Force refused permission fo me to visit the site. The FBI and US congressional delegation's efforts to intervene were rebuffed by USAF General. Fraser.. Upgrading controls from old technology hardware implementations to software/hardware based devices is fraught with issues. NOT ONLY DIGITAL DEVICES BUT ALSO BUREAUCRATIC REFUSALS TO LISTEN AND FOLLOW PROCEDURES ARE BOTH EQUALLY DANGEROUS. A description of the project is in the minutes of the Spokane Western Protective Relay Conference. Signed Theodore G.Creedon, P.E.
I take umbrage to the OP calling Langner a 'cyber terrorism expert'. He is no such thing. Mr. Langner was an ICS engineer who stumbled onto Stuxnet and eventually became an authority on this specific piece of malware because of his tenacity in researching it. While impressive in what he's done with it, he is by no means anything towards a cyber terrorism expert. Stuxnet was not a cyber terrorist weapon either; it was developed by at least one nation state. Two, if we believe the NYT (the US and Israel). Neither of these nations are considered terrorist organizations by the Western world. So the article couldn't be more wrong, really.
You think we could at least get summaries written by people who understand basic tech terms.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I dunno, I haven't read a recent issue. Their science (fact) articles used to be pretty good though.
The trouble with SF magazines is you have to wait a month for the next installment of a story. (though for short stories they are OK)
And the Kindle suscription is apparantly more costly than the paper magazine.
Has no one ever heard of (or remember) leased lines for remote access command and control. There was remote networking before the net was publicly available.
> Or maybe you could isolate control systems from the Internet.
Actually I am thinking... AND you could isolate control systems from the internet.
Take a simple steam tank (yes its an old house) like I have in by basement. Damned thing is basically a bomb in my basement (as is the water heater). You can hook up the whole system to a new control unit, which I have considered, and perhaps come up with a more intelligent means of control than the simple thermostat on/off/.... you can even go hog wild and add pressure sensors and all....
but under no circumstances would I replace the safety valves with a computer control. If I added some water level monitor to the digital control, I would still leave in the float valve emergency shut off.
Just because you have a control system doesn't mean it is ok to skimp out on safety equipment.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I am a nuclear power station engineer, in fact I am in line of signing off everything that might affect plant safety. I recognise most of what you say, such as the plant not relying on any one safety system, but on two or even three (depending on potential severity) independent and differently designed control systems (not counting the human watchkeepers) - the jargon being "redundancy and diversity". An earlier poster implied that a digital system would save people being called out of bed at 3 am for a plant event, but on my nuclear plants this would happen anyway. The station manager would certainly be called up for a plant trip (at the very least because he would want to know about it), as would several other personnel, even though safe shut-down would not depend on their presence as it would be done automatically anyway.
However, the plant operators are engineers (this is the UK) and the senior ones and fast-track juniors have degrees (though a degree does not mean so much these days), even though the Operating Department is separate from the Engineering Department. Personnel do move from one to the other, and it is expected that even senior management will have had at least a few months experience "on the desk" (ie in the Control room).
There is no way whatsoever, no-how, any-which-way-but-loose (how else can I say it?) that these sysems would have any connection to the outside world or even within the plant itself to other than to the essential control panels.
There is however a problem with modern "smart" devices such as thermocouple local amplifiers/transmitters with microchips in them. This is that we don't always know how they are programmed. I am not talking about malware, but simply the programmer making errors (or well-meaning assumptions) such as buffer overflow after a certain future date. For this reason we prefer the old-fashioned analog versions of devices at this level.
... an analog computer in this context.
When younger, I was one of a team supporting the installation of the first copy of Babbage's Difference Engine in the Science Museum (London). An interesting, but little appreciated feature is that, once set in operation, any repositioning of the counting gear mechanism causes the whole machine to lock up.
This was initially seen as a design fault, but later we considered it to be an intended feature. The machine is operated by rotating handles a number of times, and this work would usually be designated to a servant. If the servant found that he could reposition the counting mechanism to make it look as if he had rotated the handles several thousand times when he had not done so, it is likely that this would be used as a method of avoiding work, with consequent error in the calculation.
Important computer security tip from the 1820s - human maliciousness and laziness has not changed, and physical analog systems are just as prone to attack as digital electronic ones; only the vector will be different...
Several years ago, here in DC, I went to a forum about security and the Internet. On the panel were staffers from then-Sen. Kerry, and from a House committee. After it was over, I went up and spoke to each, individually, and neither had ever *heard* of the concept of an air gap between controls and the 'Net... and we were speaking of nuclear power plants, etc.
Ignorance and "cost savings" make *great* insecurity vectors.
mark
For on-call pay and two hour's minimum for getting a call? Hell yes.
The author seems to be assuming that since all digital systems have vulnerabilities, analog systems should be used. But analog systems have vulnerabilities, too.
a 3rd grader who write[sic] with technical words to look smart
uh huh
Is a piece of wax melting analog, or something else entirely?
Analog, to be digital the wax would have to be eutectic, some waxes do come close.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Really?
I'm the original VP R&D of Triconex and developer of the triplicated fault-tolerant industrial control system.
These systems have NO single points of failure, not even the power supplies, and each independent CPU is "educated" from the other verified good boards. There is no commercial operating system in these computers. They run a combination of Relay Ladder Logic and Analog Control System usually downloaded from a Wonderware or XCell application in a PC and run-tested on the actual plant machinery..
The vulnerability would be in the PC end, if those PC's are running unprotected interfaces to the Web. The PC control systems must not be connected to the Web, and the actual control application in the control computers should be programmed with automatic safety shutoffs and overrides which do not depend on the PC connections. The applications I oversaw were set up that way.