EWSN 2015 - 12th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks

INDUSTRY SESSION, February 9th 2015, Porto, Portugal

Experimenting Secure WSN for Railway Surveillance

Francesco Flammini

The company

ASTS is a leading international technology

company which specializes in railway

signaling and integrated transport systems

for mass-transit, passenger and freight rail

operations.

www.ansaldo-sts.com

2

The rail and mass-transit security business

• Prevention, detection and counteraction of

vandalisms, thefts, sabotage, terrorism, etc.

• Use of smart-technologies for intrusion detection

and surveillance, including audio-video content

analytics

• Relatively new business for companies

developing railway and mass-transit systems

• Several succesful installations worldwide

(Metrocampania, Copenhagen Cityringen, Abu

Dhabi, etc.)

3Flammini, F., Gaglione, A., Mazzocca, N., Pragliola, C., “Quantitative Security Risk Assessment and Management for Railway Transportation Infrastructures”,

In: Proc. 3rd International Workshop on Critical Information Infrastructures Security (CRITIS’08), Frascati (Rome), Italy, October 13-15, 2008, pp. 213-223.

Physical Security Information Management (PSIM)

4Bocchetti, G., Flammini, F., Pappalardo, A., Pragliola, C.: Dependable integrated surveillance systems for the physical security of metro railways. In: Proc. 3rd

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras (ICDSC 2009), 30 August - 2 September, 2009, Como (Italy): pp. 1-7

Towards WSN for rail surveillance: opportunities & issues

PROS:

• Low-cost devices (also low or no cabling costs) measuring several environmental parameters that can be indicative of physical threats

• Resilience to physical attacks due to easy to implement mesh topology and absence of both power and data cables

• Possibly “Plug’n’play”, easily maintainable and scalable

CONS:

• Radio connection (“open” network) vulnerable to interferences and attacks (jamming, hacking, etc.)

• No “ruggedized” hardware

• Limitation in power, memory and other resources -> power/resource-aware security

5Flammini, F., Gaglione, A., Ottello, F., Pappalardo, A., Pragliola, C., Tedesco, A.: Towards Wireless Sensor Networks for Railway Infrastructure Monitoring. In: Proc.

ESARS 2010, pp. 1--6, Bologna, Italy (2010)

Integrating and fusing heterogeneous sensors

6

Flammini, F., Gaglione, A., Mazzocca, N., Moscato, V., Pragliola, C., “Wireless Sensor Data Fusion for Critical Infrastructure Security”, In: Advances in Soft Computing

Vol. 53: Proc. International Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS’08), Genoa, Italy, October 23-24, 2008, pp. 92-99.

DETECT Engine

Alarm level

(1, 2, 3, ...)

Detected

attack

scenario

Event

History

Scenario

Repository

The SHIELD framework

• nSHIELD (New SHIELD) is a EU project co-

funded by the ARTEMIS JOINT UNDERTAKING

(Sub-programme SP6) focused on the research

of SPD (Security, Privacy, Dependability) in the

context of Embedded Systems.

• The nSHIELD consortium comprises 5

manufacturers and system integrators (ASTS,

ETH, HAI, ISL, SES), 7 universities (MGEP,

UNIGE, UNIROMA1, UNIUD, TUC, SICS, S-

LAB,), 10 SMEs (AT, TECNALIA, ALFA, ISD,

MAS, NOOM, T2D, TELC, THYIA, SknFnd) and 2

Industrial R&D organizations (SESM, ATHENA).

pSHIELD

Start/end: 01.06.2010 – 31.12.2011

Costs: whole project 5,4 M€

nSHIELD

Start/end: 01.11.2011 – 31.10.2014

Costs: whole project 13 M€

7Fiaschetti, A., Lavorato, F., Suraci, V., Palo, A., Taglialatela, A., Morgagni, A., Baldelli, R., Flammini, F.: On the Use of Semantic Technologies to Model and Control

Security, Privacy and Dependability in Complex Systems. In: Proc. SAFECOMP 2011, pp: 467-479

The pSHIELD rail experimentation: architecture

8Casola, V.; Esposito, M.; Mazzocca, N.; Flammini, F., "Freight Train monitoring: A Case-Study for the pSHIELD Project," Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in

Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS), 2012 Sixth International Conference on , vol., no., pp.597,602, 4-6 July 2012

The pSHIELD experimentation: functionalities

9

The pSHIELD experimentation: security

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A security attack has been simulated in which an intruder node tries to intercept the

ECDH protocol in order to pick up private information. Since the master node knows the

nodes participating in the protocol and by their ID Number (established at system

deployment), it becomes aware of an intrusion, then it immediately toggles a red led and

stops the communication.

It allows to establish a shared secret key for channel encryption and a mechanism to achieve broadcast authentication of query messages sent by the master to the motes through the ECDSA protocol. The cryptosystem is based on the WM-ECC library, a publicly available open source implementation of a 160-bit ECC (Elliptic curve cryptography) cryptosystem.

A mechanism for key exchanging

(between the master and the

motes) based on the ECDH

protocol has been implemented.

The nSHIELD experimentation: architecture

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The nSHIELD experimentation: methodology

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“Safety-world heritage” approach: - reference railway norms and international standards (CENELEC EN501XX)- semi(formal) methods like state-based testing already used for ERTMS/ETCS functional verification- “hardware-in-the-loop” simulation environment with threat-injection capabilities

CENELEC EN 50159 Keywords

Keyword Meaning

Repetition A message is received more than once

Deletion A message is removed from a message stream

Insertion A new message is implanted in the message

stream

Resequencing Messages are received in an unexpected

sequence

Corruption The information contained in a message is

changed, casually or not

Delay Messages are received at a time later than

intended

Masquerade A non-authentic message is designed thus to

appear to be authentic (an authentic message

means a valid message in which the

information is certificated as originated from

an authenticated data source)

The nSHIELD experimentation: SPD prototypes

13

Protot.

numberPrototype name

16 Reputation-Based Secure Routing

19 Policy Based Management Framework

20 Control Algorithms

22 Middleware Intrusion Detection System

24 Network Layer Security

25 OSGI Middleware

26 Semantic Model

32 Secure Discovery

33 Security Agent

Security System

-Node_Number

WSN_2

-Node_Number

WSN_1Middleware

Smart Camera

1 -is part of*1

-is part of*

-includes1

-is part of*1 -is part of*

Threat

Bad mounthing

Node Failure

Unauthorized Data Access

Middleware Intrusion

Black Hole

Node IntrusionCountermeasure

-State

-SPD_value

Prototype 19

-State

-SPD_value

Prototype 24

-State

-SPD_Value

Prototype 16

-State

-SPD_Value

Prototype 22

is installed on

is installed on

is installed on

is installed on

is conteracted by

is effective againist

is conteracted byis effective against

is counteracted byis effective against

is conteracted by is effective against

is conteracted byis effective against

is counteracted by is effective against

The nSHIELD experimentation: demonstration scenario

14

STEP DescriptionSystemStatus

SPD norm Level

2

In WSN_1 a bad mouthing attack has occurred. The middleware is informed that an attack is occurring and it sends a command to the smart camera to activate its security mechanisms. The SPD level decreases.WSN_1: Bad mouthing attackWSN_2: Encryption 64 bitsSmart Camera: Messaging - no protectionMDW_IDS: Normal

State_03 0

VERY LOW

3

The smart camera improves its SPD functionality and SPD level increases.WSN_1: Bad mouthing attackWSN_2: Encryption 64 bitsSmart Camera: Messaging - Authentication & IntegrityMDW_IDS: Normal

State_19 0,3

LOW

Lessons learnt, conclusions & future developments

• The usage of WSN in railways is very promising and enables novel real-time monitoring scenarios for

many surveillance and diagnostic applications

• Data security issues can be effectively addressed by the recent research and technological developments

• Several other issues need to be addressed in real-world scenarios to ensure feasibility, like:

• Appropriate enclosures and certification for use on-board

• Installation & maintenance procedures, compliant with railway norms and best-practices

• Energy harvesting options (solar, wind, vibrations, thermal, etc.)

• In fact, railway operators are interested in low-cost, plug’n’play, easy to maintain, reliable, safe and secure

systems… something that is not so easy to achieve at the current state of research and technology!

• While several issues have been already solved regarding data integration and security, still further efforts

are needed for the final industralisation of general-purpose WSN-based solutions for railway applications

15Hodge, V.J.; O'Keefe, S.; Weeks, M.; Moulds, A., "Wireless Sensor Networks for Condition Monitoring in the Railway Industry: A Survey,

"Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on , vol.PP, no.99, pp.1,19

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