INT CAR — MORNING
A man is stuck in traffic on his way to work. His mind wanders and his OCD kicks in: Did I leave the toaster plugged in? He pulls out his smart phone and taps the app labeled “Home Automation”, then taps “Kitchen” and “Toaster” from another list including “Stove”, “Lights”, and “Refrigerator”. The screen shows that the toaster is off and the temperature is 70°, the same as the ambient temperature of the kitchen. The man rolls his eyes and grins at his obsessive concern.
INT. KITCHEN — SAME DAY & TIME
PAN AROUND KITCHEN
Pandemonium.
The refrigerator is shooting ice cubes across the room into the glassware rack. The freezer is off and food is thawing; the refrigeration section’s temperatures is cranked up to disco and is turning into an iceberg.
The dishwasher is overflowing and suds are 10″ deep on the kitchen floor.
A ZoomBot bumps against the pastry rack, sending the smoking toaster inch by inch toward the towel rack and curtains.
That’s the scene I painted at the RSA Conference Europe in London and will be presenting at the Energy & Utility Cyber Security Summit in Amsterdam in November. Okay, so the scenario is a disaster straight from a movie plot, but is it Stephen King’s “Maximum Overdrive”, where you have to suspend disbelief as animated trucks take over the world, or a Jules Verne future prediction?
There are plenty of utility system compromises to alarm not only consumers, but security experts and government agencies:
- In 2000, when Vitek Boden was turned down for a job at an Australian water services company, he hacked into the Maroochy Shire SCADA system and released raw sewage into rivers, parks, and the grounds of a Hyatt Regency hotel.
- In 2005 and 2007, two (2) wide-spread electric outages in Brazil are blamed on hackers by the CIA. While the official explanation for one of the outages was sooty insulators, many believe the story to be a cover-up.
- In 2009, an informal report, including testimony from current and former CIA and DHS officials, claims the US electrical grid has been surreptitiously penetrated by foreign countries, notably China and Russia, over the last 5 years. Purported evidence includes time-bomb software.
And let’s not forget Stuxnet
More to the point of smart grid security, IOActive, a security research firm, reverse-engineered the smart meters from a particular manufacturer and created a worm that spread throughout a simulated smart grid infrastructure, compromising 15,000 smart meters. In real life, a similar worm or bot would give the herder the ability to wreak havoc on consumers, and possibly even the electric grid itself. Imagine if the worm/bot sent false usage information demanding more power to an electric sector and caused an overload leading to a cascading failure.
Granted, a systemic failure is theoretical, as is the kitchen pandemonium scene. In truth no one really knows what the smart grid will eventually look like or what the specific threats may be. The smart grid is like The Cloud: still evolving and amorphous.
What we do know, however, is that utility companies are not used to thinking in terms of data security; they’ve been historically concerned with the protection of hardware like transformer stations, utility poles, and electric wires, as well as consumer fraud. Now they’ll have to change their mindset to protecting not only billing information and traditional PII, but surveillance information that can let burglars know to target homes where the electric consumption drops for a few days, a clue that the homeowners are away on holiday or visiting sick Aunt Bertha, or even when you run your electric shaver or what you watch on television.
One way or another, your electricity provider or 3rd party monitoring company will have access to your home area network to monitor and control your smart appliances. It won’t be long before attackers discover this path into your house and that your home automation system is connected to everything: it dims the lights and closes the blinds when you turn on the television and lights up the gas fireplace when you play soft rock. Perhaps you have one of those fancy Japanese toilets jacked in, the ones that automatically raise the toilet seat and activate a bidet arm after you flush.
Or maybe you just have your dishwasher, toaster, and refrigerator connected.
Research Strategist, X-Force R&D, IBM