78 Editorial


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Critically Endangered


The security of Critical Infrastructure systems has predominantly focused upon IP networks in the past. Little consideration has been given to the ease with which these systems can be compromised wirelessly. Greg Jones, Director, Digital Assurance, looks at how SDR equipment could be used to execute such an attack.


the inexorable march of technological progress. Critical infrastructure systems such as SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), for instance, which were migrated to IP in a bid to make remote access economically viable, have been described as being more vulnerable to attack because this protocol is so familiar to hackers. Evidence has since emerged that critical system exploits not only exist but are even being sold to the highest bidder1


. To date, the threat has been


over IP but the emergence of readily accessible wireless hacking equipment in the form of advanced Software Defined Radio (SDR) could see these systems become vulnerable to attack over the air.


The frequency with which these critical systems are being attacked is also increasing. Between 1990- 2000 there was supposedly just one notable attack involving an insider breach, but between 2000-2005, this rose to three and there have since been five major breaches2


. The industry has been criticised for


Greg Jones, Director, Digital


Assurance


Bespoke systems, built for resilience, not security: if we looked at our critical infrastructure in evolutionary terms, they would be on the endangered list. Initially well-adapted for their environment when in isolation, these critical legacy systems have been slow to evolve and keep up with


being slow to respond and the risk is it could be caught unawares by the radio hacking threat. Prior to the emergence of cheap SDR, wireless hacking was traditionally the preserve of the an elite few, requiring intimate knowledge of wireless standards, signal analysis techniques, as well as access to expensive, complex equipment. These barriers, together with the presence of more accessible low hanging fruit, meant that over much of the last 20 years wireless hacking was confined largely to 802.11 attacks. But the emergence of SDR and the compromise of numerous implementations such as DECT, WiFi, and GSM has seen hacking ‘over-the-air’ enter the mainstream. SDR works by capturing radio frequency signals using a high-speed ADC (Analogue to Digital Converter) enabling the direct digitisation of the radio signal that can then be analysed by a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) before being converted into output data stream, which can be analysed


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