Data Exfiltration through Electromagnetic Covert Channel of Wired Industrial Control Systems
Source abstract
Abstract
Industrial control systems (ICS) often contain sensitive information related to the corresponding equipment being controlled and their configurations. Protecting such information is important to both the manufacturers and users of such ICSs. This work demonstrates an attack vector on industrial control systems where information can be exfiltrated through a electromagnetic (EM) radiation covert channel from the wired Ethernet connections commonly used by these devices. The attack leverages compromised firmware for the controller—capable of encoding sensitive/critical information into the wired network as packet transmission patterns. The EM radiation from the wired network’s communication is captured without direct physical interaction using a portable software-defined radio, and subsequently demodulated on the attacker’s computer. This covert channel facilitates the exfiltration of data from a distance of up to two metres with a data rate of 10 bps without any significant data loss. The nature of this covert channel demonstrates that having strong firewalls and network security.
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Research context
OpenAlex topics: Cryptographic Implementations and Security · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Electrostatic Discharge in Electronics
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), Colombo 7, Sri Lanka
Forensics and Security Research Group, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Belfield, 4 Dublin, Ireland
References (25)
Show source-provided references
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