OT Defender Presentation - Hacker Mindset
Presentation on hacker mindset and what utilities may be up against from lone hackers or professional groups, with ideas on how to improve defensive posture.
99 - GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
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Up up down down left right left right B A Start for the catalytic hackers of programmable materials
Catalysts have advanced over the last century to accelerate and control reactions based on static active sites. More effective catalysis can be achieved using catalysts that change with time over the course of a reaction, providing a dynamic free energy landscape that is tailored to each step in the reaction sequence. Here, the catalyst is modulated via an input program that directs the surface to change physically or electronically with time, providing information regarding the extent and duration of change optimized for specific combinations of chemistry and programmable catalyst surfaces. While in its infancy, programmable catalysis is advancing with parallel efforts to establish fundamental principles of dynamic catalysts, design of programmable materials, and strategies to design input programs that will control catalysis for faster and more selective reactions.
catalyst↗
CyberForce2020: Leading an army of 380+ APT hackers against innocent windmills.
Abstract not provided.
Phan, Kandy↗
Protecting Space in Cyber Space: When the Aliens are Hackers
No abstract available
Stathatos, Suzanne↗
Cybersecurity Information Technology
As technology and security measures improve, hackers keep looking for new techniques and vulnerabilities that allow them to gain access to sensitive data. This includes but is not limited to: user accounts, personal information, databases, operating systems, developmental and testing systems, and operational systems. A hacker is an individual that uses technology such as computers, tablets, and phones for unauthorized access to data. As technology becomes more robust at preventing known attacks, new vulnerabilities always exists. These vulnerabilities usually go unnoticed by developers and could potentially be exploited by an attacker. To prevent hackers from stealing sensitive and potentially harmful information, we must protect our systems and data against these criminals by developing new methods to mitigate the damage caused by these vulnerabilities and prevent them from occurring in the first place. An excellent way to discover how hackers compromise systems is by identifying and analyzing existing vulnerabilities and patching them. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is one of the many federal agencies that operates under a constant threat by hackers. NASA puts a tremendous amount of effort to maintain and improve their security measures, protect critical systems, and secure sensitive information from attackers who would attempt to use it against our nation's interests.
Hackers↗
Building a Successful Security Infrastructure: What You Want vs. What You Need vs. What You Can Afford
With the fast growing popularity of the Internet, many organizations are racing to get onto the on-ramp to the Information Superhighway. However, with frequent headlines such as 'Hackers' break in at General Electric raises questions about the Net's Security', 'Internet Security Imperiled - Hackers steal data that could threaten computers world-wide' and 'Stanford Computer system infiltrated; Security fears grow', organizations find themselves rethinking their approach to the on-ramp. Is the Internet safe? What do I need to do to protect my organization? Will hackers try to break into my systems? These are questions many organizations are asking themselves today. In order to safely travel along the Information Superhighway, organizations need a strong security framework. Developing such a framework for a computer site, whether it be just a few dozen hosts or several thousand hosts is not an easy task. The security infrastructure for a site is often developed piece-by-piece in response to security incidents which have affected that site over time. Or worse yet, no coordinated effort has been dedicated toward security. The end result is that many sites are still poorly prepared to handle the security dangers of the Internet. This paper presents guidelines for building a successful security infrastructure. The problem is addressed in a cookbook style method. First is a discussion on how to identify your assets and evaluate the threats to those assets; next are suggestions and tips for identifying the weak areas in your security armor. Armed with this information we can begin to think about what you really need for your site and what you can afford. In this stage of the process we examine the different categories of security tools and products that are available and then present some tips for deciding what is best for your site.
Crabb, Michele D.↗
Characterizing Vulnerabilities Associated with Connected Lighting: Exploring Authorization Protocols
Cities are upgrading their infrastructure and converting traditional indoor and outdoor luminaires to Connected Lighting Systems equipped with sensors in an aggressive effort to reduce energy consumption, increase sustainability, and improve the quality of life. When you take something seemingly benign like a lighting system and connect it to the internet, if improperly secured a potential attack vector for hackers is created. Hackers could then access sensitive information, pivot into other networks, shut down services, or enslave devices to do their bidding. In attempt to close this attack vector and secure these systems, this paper extends previous work that investigated, compared and contrasted authentication vulnerabilities in Connected Lighting Systems that identified the need for additional testing and improved test method documentation. One additional authentication test and four new authorization tests were developed utilizing the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as a test development and documentation guide. The new tests were integrated with the previous work to develop an updated test method with a focus on describing test procedures to make them easy to understand and repeat. In addition, a first Connected Lighting System use case was established to begin developing threat profiles that will aid in the identification of vulnerabilities whose focus areas extend beyond authentication and authorization. This use case describes the generation and flow of CLS data which assists in specifying methods to harden CLSs from outside interference and exploitation that can be implemented immediately on existing CLSs and as new products come to market.
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
Building Cybersecurity Educational Materials for Students: The Windfarm Capture-The-Flag Exercise
Securing and protecting critical infrastructure in an increasingly digital world is vital but it is all too often an afterthought. It is especially important that students become aware of internet safety and security at an early age. However, the availability of interactive and educational cybersecurity material targeted toward students is minimal in the United States. Here we show an example of interactive cyber security educational material that an educator can use in their classroom to encourage students to think about the interaction between real-world physical objects, cyber security, and information security. By putting together a “capture-the-flag” exercise, students can see in real time how hackers and cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities and gain access information. The students try to “capture” the “flag” (i.e., information) in the wind farm by looking for oddities in the code or by taking advantage of weaknesses in everyday protocols. Students can also see how cybersecurity interacts with the power grid through the wind farm project scenario and how a hacker could cause serious problems to a critical infrastructure sector. Our goal for the project is getting students interested in cybersecurity and help them develop an awareness of how important having robust security systems is. We also hope that this project demonstrates the importance of introducing these concepts early and inspires others to create similar projects geared toward students.
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
Stopping computer crimes
Two new books about intrusions and computer viruses remind us that attacks against our computers on networks are the actions of human beings. Cliff Stoll's book about the hacker who spent a year, beginning in Aug. 1986, attempting to use the Lawrence Berkeley Computer as a stepping-stone for access to military secrets is a spy thriller that illustrates the weaknesses of our password systems and the difficulties in compiling evidence against a hacker engaged in espionage. Pamela Kane's book about viruses that attack IBM PC's shows that viruses are the modern version of the old problem of a Trojan horse attack. It discusses the most famous viruses and their countermeasures, and it comes with a floppy disk of utility programs that will disinfect your PC and thwart future attack.
Denning, Peter J.↗
Making Wireless Networks Secure for NASA Mission Critical Applications using Virtual Private Network (VPN) Technology
With so many security issues involved with wireless networks, the technology has not been fully utilized in the area of mission critical applications. These applications would include the areas of telemetry, commanding, voice and video. Wireless networking would allow payload operators the mobility to take computers outside of the control room to their offices and anywhere else in the facility that the wireless network was extended. But the risk is too great of having someone sit just inside of your wireless network coverage and intercept enough of your network traffic to steal proprietary data from a payload experiment or worse yet hack back into your system and do even greater harm by issuing harmful commands. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is improving but has a ways to go before it can be trusted to protect mission critical data. Today s hackers are becoming more aggressive and innovative, and in order to take advantage of the benefits that wireless networking offer, appropriate security measures need to be in place that will thwart hackers. The Virtual Private Network (VPN) offers a solution to the security problems that have kept wireless networks from being used for mission critical applications. VPN provides a level of encryption that will ensure that data is protected while it is being transmitted over a wireless local area network (IAN). The VPN allows a user to authenticate to the site that the user needs to access. Once this authentication has taken place the network traffic between that site and the user is encapsulated in VPN packets with the Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES). 3DES is an encryption standard that uses a single secret key to encrypt and decrypt data. The length of the encryption key is 168 bits as opposed to its predecessor DES that has a 56-bit encryption key. Even though 3DES is the common encryption standard for today, the Advance Encryption Standard (AES), which provides even better encryption at a lower cycle cost is growing acceptance. The user computer running the VPN client and the. target site that is running the . VPN firewall exchange this encryption key and therefore are the only ones that are able to decipher the data. The level of encryption offered by the VPN is making it possible for wireless networks to pass the strict security policies that have kept them from being used in the past. Now people will be able to benefit from the many advantages that wireless networking has to offer in the area of mission critical applications.
Nichols, Kelvin F.↗
Making Wireless Networks Secure for NASA Mission Critical Applications Using Virtual Private Network (VPN) Technology
With so many security issues involved with wireless networks, the technology has not been fully utilized in the area of mission critical applications. These applications would include the areas of telemetry, commanding, voice and video. Wireless networking would allow payload operators the mobility to take computers outside of the control room to their off ices and anywhere else in the facility that the wireless network was extended. But the risk is too great of having someone sit just inside of your wireless network coverage and intercept enough of your network traffic to steal proprietary data from a payload experiment or worse yet hack back into your system and do even greater harm by issuing harmful commands. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is improving but has a ways to go before it can be trusted to protect mission critical data. Today s hackers are becoming more aggressive and innovative, and in order to take advantage of the benefits that wireless networking offer, appropriate security measures need to be in place that will thwart hackers. The Virtual Private Network (VPN) offers a solution to the security problems that have kept wireless networks from being used for mission critical applications. VPN provides a level of encryption that will ensure that data is protected while it is being transmitted over a wireless local area network (LAN). The VPN allows a user to authenticate to the site that the user needs to access. Once this authentication has taken place the network traffic between that site and the user is encapsulated in VPN packets with the Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES). 3DES is an encryption standard that uses a single secret key to encrypt and decrypt data. The length of the encryption key is 168 bits as opposed to its predecessor DES that has a 56-bit encryption key. Even though 3DES is the common encryption standard for today, the Advance Encryption Standard (AES), which provides even better encryption at a lower cycle cost is growing acceptance. The user computer running the VPN client and the target site that is running the VPN firewall exchange this encryption key and therefore are the only ones that are able to decipher the data. The level of encryption offered by the VPN is making it possible for wireless networks to pass the strict security policies that have kept them from being used in the past. Now people will be able to benefit from the many advantages that wireless networking has to offer in the area of mission critical applications.
Nichols, Kelvin F.↗
Load altering attack-tolerant defense strategy for load frequency control system
Cyber attacks are emerging threats to every information-oriented energy management system. By violating the cyber systems, the hacker can disrupt the security and stability due to the strong coupling between the cyber and physical facilities. In this paper, one type of cyber attacks designated as the load altering attack is studied for the power system frequency control, and corresponding defense strategies are proposed to improve the frequency control performance. Considering the difficulty of the application of model-based controller into large-scale power systems, a novel model-free defense framework is for the first time presented. Under this framework, both active defense and passive defense strategies are designed. The former assumes that the defender has the initiative to learn different attack scenarios. Adaptive defense strategies are implemented using the online attack identification information and off-line trained strategy pool. The latter assumes that the defender passively tolerates various attack scenarios via the pre-trained off-line strategy. Both approaches prove to be effective through validation based on the IEEE benchmark systems. The proposed defense framework and defense strategies can be extended to other energy control systems to enhance their attack tolerance capability.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Digital Twin Technology for Safety, Security, and Training in Spent Nuclear Fuel Handling
The increasing complexity of spent nuclear fuel handling requires significant resources to ensure safety, security, and personnel training. As nuclear facilities have continued to advance in scale and technology, the integration of digital tools has become indispensable. Among these tools, digital twins, which are virtual models of physical systems, are emerging as invaluable tools for enhancing safety protocols, security measures, and training in the nuclear sector. These models were conceptualized in the Industry 4.0 revolution. Digital twins can process data from physical systems in real time (by using sensors), include multiple code packages to enable simulations of different physics applications, and even implement artificial intelligence or machine learning techniques for advanced data processing. Despite the advantages that digital twins provide, challenges still exist regarding their widespread implementation. For instance, data used by a digital twin must be accurate to ensure that the digital twin is accurately tuned. Furthermore, if insecure digital twins are targeted by hackers, then they can pose serious risks to the security and safety of nuclear facilities.
Digital twins↗
Effectiveness of Privacy Techniques in Smart Metering Systems
Smart grid technologies enable timely energy billing for residential homes. The ability to react to energy demands during peak hours allows energy providers to conserve power and operate efficiently. However, these data streams are also susceptible to privacy attacks within the energy company and from outside hackers. We implemented four different privacy models: k-anonymous, l-diversity, t-closeness, and ε-differential privacy. We demonstrate the models’ effectiveness using a real-world dataset composed of 15 different residential households with energy consumption data spanning over a year.
Peralta-Peterson, Martin↗
Cyber-Attack Identification of Synchrophasor Data Via VMD and Multifusion SVM
A large amount of synchrophasor data in the wide area measurement system (WAMS) needs to be collected and transmitted to the phasor data concentrator, thereby increasing the possibility of being attacked by hackers. The attacked data are therefore hidden into the normal synchrophasor data so that the synchrophasor data based application will be affected. To remedy this problem, an identification framework is proposed to detect the data cyber-attack in WAMS utilizing variational mode decomposition (VMD) and multifusion support vector machine (MSVM). First, VMD is used to transform the attacked data into multiple modal components. Thereafter, a novel MSVM is employed to classify the deterministic features using the proposed linear combined multikernel (LCM). Further, this LCM can fuse multiple types of features, including the time, frequency, and statistical domains of the synchrophasor data. Utilizing the actual data from FNET/GridEye, different experiments are conducted under multiple attack strengths and types. The results demonstrate that the identification framework has higher precision and robustness compared with other conventional classifiers.
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
Detection of Synchrophasor False Data Injection Attack using Feature Interactive Network
The synchrophasor data recorded by Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) plays an increasingly critical role in the regulation and situational awareness of power systems. However, the widely installed PMUs are vulnerable to multiple malicious attacks from cyber hackers during data transmission and storage. To address this problem, a Modified Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (MEEMD) is proposed first to extract the intrinsic mode functions of each Synchrophasor Data Attacks (SDA). The frequency-based adaptive screening criterion embedded in MEEMD is used to eliminate the false intrinsic mode functions. Next, a Multivariate Convolutional Neural Network (MCNN) is proposed to identify multiple SDA by utilizing the extracted intrinsic mode functions and original SDA as input vectors. A fusion block as the main structure of MCNN is also leveraged to increase the diversity of features and compress the model parameters. Integrating MEEMD and MCNN, a framework with automatic feature extraction and multi-source information fusion capability, referred to as Feature Interactive Network (FIN), is proposed to detect multiple SDA. Based on the proposed FIN framework, six types of SDA are explored for the first time using actual synchrophasor data in FNET/Grideye that was collected from different locations in the U.S. Eastern Interconnection. Finally, a large quantity of experiments with different attack strengths are used to evaluate the adaptability and classification performance of the proposed FIN.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
A Scalable Quantum Cryptography Network for Protected Automation Communication (Final Report)
This is the final report for a CEDS-funded project aimed at developing a new quantum technology for securing utility communication networks used to control and monitor electrical grid equipment. Securing these control networks represents a unique challenge as the performance of the security solution has a direct impact on the stability and reliability of the electrical grid. Traditional, software-based solutions - developed for information networks - are not suitable for utility control networks because they introduce latency, require burdensome maintenance and upgrades, are often incompatible with legacy equipment, and introduce operational complexity that reduces grid reliability. Consequently, many U.S. utilities do not use existing solutions and, instead, protect their critical control networks through the careful isolation and obscuration of their networked equipment. With more utilities embracing grid automation, the attack surface that utilities must defend from hackers has grown to an unmanageable size. To address this situation, Qubitekk and its partners proposed and developed a hardware-based solution that can secure critical control networks without negatively impacting grid performance. This new solution is based on quantum key distribution (QKD) techniques that guarantee secure key generation and distribution across a utility control network. Through deployment and field testing of a prototype QKD system, we have shown that this solution delivers long-term network security, is technically feasible to implement and maintain on a utility’s distribution substation network and does not negatively impact grid operations. In addition, the project has identified and solved key challenges associated with generating, transmitting, and measuring coherent photonic quantum states on a real-world fiber optic network. These additional findings are playing a critical role in advancing quantum networks for quantum computing applications. An overview of the QKD prototype development effort, field testing activities and results, and additional findings relevant to emerging quantum networks are presented in this report.
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
Assessment of the High Flux Isotope Reactor Cybersecurity Initiative
Recent cyber-attacks on industrial control systems, and inadvertent exposure of nuclear plant systems to cyber-exploits underscore the need for plant operators to adopt and deploy cyber-security defense solutions made for industrial control systems. Of increasing concern is the fact that international cyber hackers are beginning to target critical infrastructure, and because these more modern controls systems depend on advanced use of digital systems, they are more vulnerable than ever before to cyber-attacks. Traditional cyber defense strategies and products that have been available for decades are tailored for use on IT or corporate networks but can cause interruptions and catastrophic damage when deployed on industrial control system networks. The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy established the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program to provide private companies pursuing innovative nuclear energy technologies with access to the technical support necessary to move toward commercialization. One of these GAIN small business vouchers was awarded to Dragos, Inc. to enable collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to evaluate the Dragos Platform on a production nuclear reactor test bed, hence laying the path for future commercial adoption. The vision was to provide a guide for industrial operators on implementing an industrial monitoring solution and to show how these solutions can be deployed without causing safety and reliability issues. This report documents the results of the collaboration between ORNL and Dragos, Inc.
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗