Malicious and Deliberate Attacks and Power System Resiliency

Abstract

Modern embedded systems control sensitive data and information depending where these systems are installed to accomplish required tasks. Due to this aspect, cyber criminals or hackers are motivated and determined to rob intellectual property of these systems through more and more sophisticated attacks . A huge problem in defending against these massive and various types of attacks is that in the last years attacks increased their complexity while the knowledge of an attacker decreased significantly because of the tools and devices they can find in the online world and free market. The most important challenges to defend against an attack are represented by these factors: speed of the attack, complexity of the attack and the simplicity of the tools that attackers used. A very often question that most of designers and developers of embedded systems ask is: Why cyber criminals commit attacks and what motivates them? Is it money? Is it celebrity? The answer starts with simple entertainment and extends to material benefits and finding, very often, valuable sensitive information that can cause serious damages to a system and its dependencies or even terrorism acts. Best case scenario is when the attacker is exactly the owner/the developer of the system or when he is demanding various attacks in order to figure out how defense mechanisms resist when facing attacks, how these can be improved and what are the challenges in building new ones. Therefore, this chapter is focused on two main ideas considering modern embedded systems based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology such as communication networks or cryptographic systems. The first idea refers to malicious and deliberate attacks performed against embedded systems starting with risks , threats and vulnerabilities that motivated hackers find and exploit and the second idea is about power system resilience and how attacked systems respond and decide what to do next. This chapter is organized in six parts as follows. The first part of this chapter is an introduction about attacks on embedded systems and a background that provides all the necessary information of how attackers and attacks evolved in the last years. The second part is focused on who performs these attacks and how systems are attacked. The third part refers to the main attacks on embedded systems and how these are classified depending on different criteria such as interlinking features, integration level or programmability level. The fourth part of this chapter is about power system resilience and how actual systems react or how they should react in case of malicious attacks . The fifth part refers, with examples, to the vulnerabilities existing in modern equipment that surrounds us and how these are or can be attacked such as mobile and communication systems and social apps that we use every day. The last part concludes the chapter and draws some goals for future research directions. The main purposes of this chapter are: to review and categorize all types of attacks against embedded systems based on FPGA , to show how attacks evolved from their beginnings until present, to bring to light who are the attackers as well as what motivates these hackers and to picture how “resiliency” feature should operate or operates during life-cycle of embedded systems when someone wants to perform an attack or succeeds one. Another important goal that this chapter aims for is to find and show others vulnerabilities existing in modern systems, especially communications , that most of us can not live without them.