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Please note that the paper, written late last year, is now outdated in two respects.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>

Speaking at S4 in Miami

On Thursday, January 22nd, I'll be presenting at Digital Bond’s SCADA Security Scientific Symposium (S4) a paper authored with Brad Singletary and Darren Highfill of Enernex on the topic of Low-Level Design Vulnerabilities in Wireless Control Systems Hardware. As 802.15.4 sensors and similar hardware are subject to theft by an attacker, we demonstrate several practical attacks that we've been cooking up for the past year. We include plenty of schematic diagrams, logic analyzer recordings, oscilloscope photographs, and code fragments to keep things interesting. Attendance is strictly limited to fifty-five, and registration is expected to sell-out this year.

Please email me if you'd like to meet up while I'm in town. As always, I'll bring some of my equipment for a show and tell.

Cheers,
--Travis Goodspeed
<travis at utk.edu>