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January 26, 2018 04:00 am

Researchers Warn of Physics-Based Attacks On Sensors

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Billions of sensors that are already deployed lack protections against attacks that manipulate the physical properties of devices to cause sensors and embedded devices to malfunction, researchers working in the U.S. and China have warned. In an article in Communications of the ACM, researchers Kevin Fu of the University of Michigan and Wenyuan Xu of Zhejiang University warn that analog signals such as sound or electromagnetic waves can be used as part of "transduction attacks" to spoof data by exploiting the physics of sensors. Researchers say a "return to classic engineering approaches" is needed to cope with physics-based attacks on sensors and other embedded devices, including a focus on system-wide (versus component-specific) testing and the use of new manufacturing techniques to thwart certain types of transduction attacks. "This is about uncovering the physics of cyber security and how some of the physical properties of systems have been abstracted to the point that we don't have a good way to describe the security of the system," Dr Fu told The Security Ledger in a conversation last week. That is particularly true of sensor driven systems, like those that will populate the Internet of Things. Cyberattacks typically target vulnerabilities in software such as buffer overflows or cross-site scripting. But transduction attacks target the physics of the hardware that underlies that software, including the circuit boards that discrete components are deployed on, or the materials that make up the components themselves. Although the attacks target vulnerabilities in the hardware, the consequences often arise as software systems, such as the improper functioning or denial of service to a sensor or actuator, the researchers said. Hardware and software have what might be considered a "social contract" that analog information captured by sensors will be rendered faithfully as it is transformed into binary data that software can interpret and act on it. But materials used to create sensors can be influenced by other phenomenon -- such as sound waves. Through the targeted use of such signals, the behavior of the sensor can be interfered with and even manipulated. "The problem starts with the mechanics or physics of the material and bubbles up into the operating system," Fu told The Security Ledger.

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