Other

Technion Research & Development Foundation Ltd

Eli Biham

Elad Pinhas Barkan

Sara Bitan-Erlich

Rafael Chen

Shay Kutten

Eli Gavril

Alon Dankner

One of the main obstacles of securing industrial control systems is the lack of an appropriate security model that is both implementable by vendors and addresses the inherent security and usability issues needed by organizations. Current solutions such as device passwords and IPSec lack scalable key management infrastructure and fine granularity access control mechanisms. A security model for industrial control systems that supports organizational level authorizations and authentication requirements, while hiding the low-level details (e.g., keys and passwords) from the users is disclosed. It also enables easy addition and removal of PLCs, engineering station, HMI devices and users, and assigning permission to them. A major advantage is its support for hybrid ICS systems, characterized by co-existence of legacy devices and new devices, while using the same protocol. Devices may communicate therein either natively, or by a connected converter. This co-existence allows organizations to gradually switch from a fully-legacy ICS to ICS natively supporting the disclosed security model, by replacing a single (or a few) devices at a time, incurring little or no system downtime. An exemplary protocol supporting the disclosed security model, namely K7, is based on the Siemens S7 protocol, and enhances it with new cryptographic features to support the extra functionality. Similar enhancements may be applied to other protocols. A ticket-based system, (e.g., Kerberos with LDAP server) used to support the exchange of permissions and keys, is incorporated into the disclosed protocol. K7 may be implemented as a protocol converter add-on to standard Siemens clients and PLCs that transform them into augmented devices that use K7. Siemens and other vendors may add direct support for K7 on their ICS systems, devices, and the like in the future.

Protected protocol for industrial control systems that fits large organizations

A system for authenticating messages transmitted on a bus based on physical location of transmitting units, comprising a reflector adapted to inject a plurality of reflection signals at a first point of a line topology bus, each in response to each of a plurality of messages transmitted by a plurality of bus connected units and a probe adapted to intercept the messages and the reflection signals at a second point of the bus. The probe calculates propagation timing between a reception time of the message and a reception time of an associated reflection signal transmitted in response to the message and determines validity of the message according to a match between the calculated propagation timing and a predefined propagation timings associated with the bus connected units. Wherein the bus connected units are statically connected to the bus between the first point and the second point.

Message authentication based on a physical location on a bus

Cryptanalysis method and system

Authenticating a user by presenting an authentication instruction to an individual via any computing device output interfaces, the authentication instruction selected from an identity authentication profile, receiving a response to the authentication instruction via any input methods supported by the computing device, the response including content provided through the performance of an action, determining a current action measurement for characteristics associated with the action, and a current content measurement for characteristics associated with the content, where the characteristics are associated with the authentication instruction, determining that each of the measurements matches a corresponding benchmark associated with the authentication instruction to within a predefined tolerance, where the benchmarks are selected from the identity authentication profile and performing the presenting, receiving, and determining steps for each of a predefined number of authentication instructions selected from the identity authentication profile, thereby authenticating the individual.

User authentication system and methods

In a cellular interception system, an information processing method for converting information of several cellular-network wireless messages from a first encrypted format under a session key, where each message is encrypted by a cellular ciphering algorithm chosen out of a collection of one or more cellular ciphering algorithms under the session key, to a second unencrypted format comprising: (A) divide the messages in the first format into two sets; the first set containing messages encrypted under the same encryption algorithm, and a second set containing the remaining messages. (B) subject the messages in the first set to a ciphertext-only cryptanalysis of a cellular encryption algorithm to recover the session key. (C) for each message in the second set, subject the message together with the recovered session key to the corresponding cellular ciphering algorithm to receive the message's information in the second format.

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Haifa, Israel

Eli Biham