CSPoweR-Watch: A Cyber-Resilient Residential Power Management System
Modern Energy Management Systems (EMS) are becoming increasingly complex in order to address the urgent issue of global energy consumption. These systems retrieve vital information from various Internet-connected devices in a smart grid to function effectively. However, due to the critical tasks they perform and the sensitive information they handle, such devices make a very attractive target for attackers. Numerous factors including high interconnectivity and outdated firmware, result in such devices being susceptible to cyber attacks. Malicious actors can exploit these vulnerabilities present in the devices to perform detrimental tasks such as modifying critical firmware, sending bogus sensor data, or stealing sensitive information. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that integrates PowerWatch, a solution that detects compromised devices in the smart grid, with Cyber-secure Power Router (CSPR), a modern energy management system that is connected to various smart-grid devices. In addition, we propose a distributed infrastructure scheme in which numerous CSPR devices are being monitored using PowerWatch capabilities. The goal is to ascertain whether or not CSPR has operated maliciously, which PowerWatch achieves by utilizing a machine learning model that analyzes information from system or library call lists extracted from CSPR in order to detect malicious activity in the EMS. To test the efficacy of our framework, a number of unique attack scenarios were performed on a realistic testbed that comprises functional versions of CSPR and PowerWatch. Our performance evaluation investigates the effectiveness of this first-of-its-kind merger and provides insight into the feasibility of developing future cyber-secure EMS. The results of our experimental procedures yielded 100\% accuracy for each of the attack scenarios. Finally, our implementation demonstrates that the integration of PowerWatch and CSPR is effective and yields minimal overhead to the EMS.
Project Sponsor: National Science Foundation
HDMI-Walk: Attacking HDMI devices through the High Definition Media Interface (HDMI)
Privacy-Aware Wearable-Assisted Continuous Authentication Framework
SaINT: Sensitive Information Tracking in IoT Applications
Proviz: Sensor Development Software for IoT Devices
6thSense: Securing Sensory Side-Channels in Cyber-Physical Systems and IoT Devices and Applications
Compromised Device Detection
Authors: Abbas Acar, Hossein Fereidooni, Tigist Abera, Amit Kumar Sikder, Markus Miettinen, Hidayet Aksu, Mauro Conti, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, A. Selcuk Uluagac Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02741.pdf Corresponding Author: Abbas Acar In this work, we introduce a novel multi-stage privacy attack against user privacy in a smart environment. It is realized utilizing state-of-the-art machine-learning approaches for detecting and identifying particular types of IoT devices, their actions, states, and ongoing user activities in a cascading style by only observing passively the traffic from smart home devices and sensors. The attack effectively works on both encrypted and unencrypted communications. We evaluate the efficiency of the attack with real measurements from an extensive set of popular off-the-shelf smart home IoT devices and sensors utilizing a set of diverse network protocols like WiFi, ZigBee, and BLE. Our results show that an adversary passively sniffing the traffic can achieve very high accuracy (above 90%) in identifying the state and actions of targeted smart home devices and their users. To protect against this privacy leakage, we also propose a countermeasure based on generating spoofed traffic to hide the real activities of the devices. We also demonstrate that the provided solution provides better protection than existing solutions. 
Aegis: A Context-aware Security Framework for Smart Home Systems
