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I could imagine a malicious defect in Tesla firmware that would cause all Tesla vehicles on the road to make an aggressive manoeuvre that would most likely resu

I could imagine a malicious defect in Tesla firmware that would cause all Tesla vehicles on the road to make an aggressive manoeuvre that would most likely result in a crash at the same time. So I think the potential scale for death and injury With remotely updatable vehicle firmware is large. Can you recommend any VPNs that are up to the required standard for critical infrastructure? Although since the power plants I work on would struggle to kill even one person and damaging them would only cause financial hardship for the owner or an insignificant exceedanve of environmental regulations, so they must not be critical.

atoav 6y ago
Wireguard is the thing I would use. The fact that non other than Linus Torvalds called wireguard "a piece of art" may or may not be a selling factor. It is small, lightweight, reliable and does what it is meant to do. It uses existing, trusted network tech in the right ways and due to the low complexity you reading the source code is an realistic option.
- bennofs 6y ago
  Does wireguard support storing keys in a hardware device, so that the cannot easily be exfiltrated if the machine is compromised? You want that for security critical infrastructure.
  - SXX 6y ago
    AFAIK implementation in Linux kernel not yet support any hardware-backed handshake, but it's mainly because WireGuard developers didn't consider code stable until March of 2020. But there are userspace implementations and I guess it's should be doable to make them talk to a hardware device.
waste_monk 6y ago
>I could imagine a malicious defect in Tesla firmware that would cause all Tesla vehicles on the road to make an aggressive manoeuvre that would most likely result in a crash at the same time. So I think the potential scale for death and injury With remotely updatable vehicle firmware is large. It's pretty low risk AFAIK, generally cars infotainment and CAN bus are isolated, and I understand Tesla vehicles can't update while driving. Who knows, I'm not familiar with their architecture, but I'm not too worried about it. There are attacks but IIRC they rely on GPS spoofing, or tricking machine vision to cause the vehicle to swerve or accelerate, you can't just drive someone off a cliff over 4G (at least without implanting hardware into the car). >Can you recommend any VPNs that are up to the required standard for critical infrastructure? Approved devices vary by country, but this list is a decent example: https://www.ia.nato.int/niapc/Category/IP-Encryption_25 https://www.ia.nato.int/niapc/Category/IP-Encryption_25 Unfortunately it's hard to provide info when these kinds of products are not generally available for purchase outside of the defence community, and the user manuals and related documentation are themselves restricted. But generally speaking if it's acceptable for use with classified info then it should be adequate protection for critical infrastructure. >Although since the power plants I work on would struggle to kill even one person and damaging them would only cause financial hardship for the owner or an insignificant exceedanve of environmental regulations, so they must not be critical. They might be relatively harmless in isolation, but it could be really harmful if an attacker could compromise a dozen of these small plants and disable or destroy them at the same time so there's less reserve capacity in the grid to pick up the slack when you launch your main attack. You don't even need to have that big of an impact on industry or what have you, just causing a blackout on a hot day and killing a bunch of elderly people via heatstroke would whip people into a panic. Or perhaps an attacker would compromise one plant and use it as a vector to attack someone like you next time you connect, gain a pivot point via your workstation to set up a persistent backdoor and steal confidential documents and email so they know your schedules and organisational weaknesses, steal your VPN credentials and attack multiple power plants at once when it suits them, etc.
- rhodozelia 6y ago
  Thanks for the VPN link. >They might be relatively harmless in isolation, but it could be really harmful if an attacker could compromise a dozen of these small plants and disable or destroy them at the same time so there's less reserve capacity in the grid to pick up the slack when you launch your main attack. I suppose it depends on what is considered a small power plant. I would say anything less than 20MW is small, greater than 30 MW is medium, and greater than 100 MW is large. Simultaneously tripping a dozen 20 MW power plants would result in a loss of 240 MW of generation, about the same as 2 large units. There is 258,000 MW of nameplate generation on the western north american grid and a peak load of about 150,000 MW. The link below [0] shows that transmission level operators are looking at 1000's of MW of lost generation to have a measurable impact on the grid but losing that amount of generation causes operational headaches and not automatically an outage. [0]: https://www.wecc.org/Reliability/2013-10%20WECC%20JSIS%20-%20Frequency%20Response%20in%20Western%20Interconnection.pdf https://www.wecc.org/Reliability/2013-10%20WECC%20JSIS%20-%2...

atoav 6y ago

Wireguard is the thing I would use. The fact that non other than Linus Torvalds called wireguard "a piece of art" may or may not be a selling factor. It is small, lightweight, reliable and does what it is meant to do. It uses existing, trusted network tech in the right ways and due to the low complexity you reading the source code is an realistic option.

bennofs 6y ago
Does wireguard support storing keys in a hardware device, so that the cannot easily be exfiltrated if the machine is compromised? You want that for security critical infrastructure.
- SXX 6y ago
  AFAIK implementation in Linux kernel not yet support any hardware-backed handshake, but it's mainly because WireGuard developers didn't consider code stable until March of 2020. But there are userspace implementations and I guess it's should be doable to make them talk to a hardware device.

waste_monk 6y ago

>I could imagine a malicious defect in Tesla firmware that would cause all Tesla vehicles on the road to make an aggressive manoeuvre that would most likely result in a crash at the same time. So I think the potential scale for death and injury With remotely updatable vehicle firmware is large. It's pretty low risk AFAIK, generally cars infotainment and CAN bus are isolated, and I understand Tesla vehicles can't update while driving. Who knows, I'm not familiar with their architecture, but I'm not too worried about it. There are attacks but IIRC they rely on GPS spoofing, or tricking machine vision to cause the vehicle to swerve or accelerate, you can't just drive someone off a cliff over 4G (at least without implanting hardware into the car). >Can you recommend any VPNs that are up to the required standard for critical infrastructure? Approved devices vary by country, but this list is a decent example: https://www.ia.nato.int/niapc/Category/IP-Encryption_25 https://www.ia.nato.int/niapc/Category/IP-Encryption_25 Unfortunately it's hard to provide info when these kinds of products are not generally available for purchase outside of the defence community, and the user manuals and related documentation are themselves restricted. But generally speaking if it's acceptable for use with classified info then it should be adequate protection for critical infrastructure. >Although since the power plants I work on would struggle to kill even one person and damaging them would only cause financial hardship for the owner or an insignificant exceedanve of environmental regulations, so they must not be critical. They might be relatively harmless in isolation, but it could be really harmful if an attacker could compromise a dozen of these small plants and disable or destroy them at the same time so there's less reserve capacity in the grid to pick up the slack when you launch your main attack. You don't even need to have that big of an impact on industry or what have you, just causing a blackout on a hot day and killing a bunch of elderly people via heatstroke would whip people into a panic. Or perhaps an attacker would compromise one plant and use it as a vector to attack someone like you next time you connect, gain a pivot point via your workstation to set up a persistent backdoor and steal confidential documents and email so they know your schedules and organisational weaknesses, steal your VPN credentials and attack multiple power plants at once when it suits them, etc.

rhodozelia 6y ago
Thanks for the VPN link. >They might be relatively harmless in isolation, but it could be really harmful if an attacker could compromise a dozen of these small plants and disable or destroy them at the same time so there's less reserve capacity in the grid to pick up the slack when you launch your main attack. I suppose it depends on what is considered a small power plant. I would say anything less than 20MW is small, greater than 30 MW is medium, and greater than 100 MW is large. Simultaneously tripping a dozen 20 MW power plants would result in a loss of 240 MW of generation, about the same as 2 large units. There is 258,000 MW of nameplate generation on the western north american grid and a peak load of about 150,000 MW. The link below [0] shows that transmission level operators are looking at 1000's of MW of lost generation to have a measurable impact on the grid but losing that amount of generation causes operational headaches and not automatically an outage. [0]: https://www.wecc.org/Reliability/2013-10%20WECC%20JSIS%20-%20Frequency%20Response%20in%20Western%20Interconnection.pdf https://www.wecc.org/Reliability/2013-10%20WECC%20JSIS%20-%2...