TY - CONF
T1 - Embedded firmware diversity for smart electric meters
AU - McLaughlin, Stephen
AU - Podkuiko, Dmitry
AU - Delozier, Adam
AU - Miadzvezhanka, Sergei
AU - McDaniel, Patrick
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Seth Blum-sack for his insights into electric utility operations. This material is based upon work supported by Lockheed Martin. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Lock-heed Martin.
Publisher Copyright:
© HotSec 2010 - 5th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security. All rights reserved.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Smart meters are now being aggressively deployed worldwide, with tens of millions of meters in use today and hundreds of millions more to be deployed in the next few years. These low-cost (?50) embedded devices have not fared well under security analysis: experience has shown that the majority of current devices that have come under scrutiny can be exploited by unsophisticated attackers. The potential for large-scale attacks that target a single or a few vulnerabilities is thus very real. In this paper, we consider how diversity techniques can limit large-scale attacks on smart meters. We show how current meter designs do not possess the architectural features needed to support existing diversity approaches such as address space randomization. In response, we posit a new return address encryption technique suited to the computationally and resource limited smart meters. We conclude by considering analytically the effect of diversity on an attacker wishing to launch a large-scale attack, showing how a lightweight diversity scheme can force the time needed for a large compromise into the scale of years.
AB - Smart meters are now being aggressively deployed worldwide, with tens of millions of meters in use today and hundreds of millions more to be deployed in the next few years. These low-cost (?50) embedded devices have not fared well under security analysis: experience has shown that the majority of current devices that have come under scrutiny can be exploited by unsophisticated attackers. The potential for large-scale attacks that target a single or a few vulnerabilities is thus very real. In this paper, we consider how diversity techniques can limit large-scale attacks on smart meters. We show how current meter designs do not possess the architectural features needed to support existing diversity approaches such as address space randomization. In response, we posit a new return address encryption technique suited to the computationally and resource limited smart meters. We conclude by considering analytically the effect of diversity on an attacker wishing to launch a large-scale attack, showing how a lightweight diversity scheme can force the time needed for a large compromise into the scale of years.
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M3 - Paper
AN - SCOPUS:84879877502
T2 - 5th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, HotSec 2010
Y2 - 10 August 2010
ER -