S4 Paper

Howdy Y'all,

A paper of mine from S4/Miami, Low-Level Design Vulnerabilties in Wireless Control Systems Hardware, has recently been made publicly available by Digital Bond. Coauthored with Brad Singletary and Darren Highfill, it provides a detailed survey of vulnerabilities that might be found in the hardware and firmware of AMI Smart Meters and similar equipment.

Please note that the paper, written late last year, is now outdated in two respects. First, the self-propagating worm presented hypothetically in Section 3.1 is no longer hypothetical. Mike Davis has written one. Second, the System-on-Chip Zigbee devices advocated in the conclusion of Section 4.1 are not secure, as I have since demonstrated in Extracting Keys from Second Generation Zigbee Chips.

--Travis Goodspeed
<travis at radiantmachines.com>