The second talk on the final day of
the “Is Cryptographic Theory Practically Relevant?” workshop was
about exploiting some weaknesses in embedded systems used in some
real-life applications and was given by Hovav Shacham. The talk
summarizes the result of a comprehensive study undertaken by many
researchers and its aim was to investigate and exploit
vulnerabilities in embedded systems used in real life; in particular,
the study was concerned with automobiles and voting machines.
All modern cars rely on computerized
units to achieve different functionalities related to efficiency,
entertainment, safety and security. Although there exist attacks
which require access to the car, the study was more concerned with
vulnerabilities which could be exploited remotely (i.e. without
requiring physical access to the car) via different communication
channels such as Bluetooth, WiFi and other channels which are used
for instance for crash warning etc.
The team involved in the study
developed a software that listens to communication between the
different components in the car or between the car and the outside
world, and then injects some messages to force some malicious
behaviour. Exploiting some vulnerabilities, the study showed that an
attacker could take complete control of many components in the car.
Such vulnerabilities allowed the attacker to, for instance,
disable the brake system, control the readings of the speedometer
and lock the driver in.
The study also investigated some
vulnerabilities in the context of voting via voting marines. Such
machines are required to incorporated some basic checks to ensure
the correctness and the fairness of the outcome of a vote. For
instance, a mechanism to ensure that a voter can only vote once is
required.
The attacks mounted only required
access to the machines themselves and did not require access to
neither the underlying source code nor the vendor's manual.
Those vulnerabilities are serious
because of the communication capabilities which could affect not only
a single car itself but an entire network.
Most of the vulnerabilities are an
obvious result of the designers failing to understand cryptography
and therefore resulting them getting even the simplest requirements
wrong. Besides other security flaws, the attacks exploited the
absence of proper communication authentication and the lack of
sufficient mechanisms to protect the memory content of the
computerized components.
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