Date of Award

8-1-2011

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Department of Computer Science

First Advisor

Sergey Bratus

Abstract

Securing embedded control systems within the power grid presents a unique challenge: on top of the resource restrictions inherent to these devices, SCADA systems must also accommodate strict timing requirements that are non-negotiable, and their massive scale greatly amplifies costs such as power consumption. These constraints make the conventional approach to host intrusion detection--namely, employing virtualization in some manner--too costly or impractical for embedded control systems within critical infrastructure. Instead, we take an in-kernel approach to system protection, building upon the Autoscopy system developed by Ashwin Ramaswamy that places probes on indirectly-called functions and uses them to monitor its host system for behavior characteristic of control-flow-altering malware, such as rootkits. In this thesis, we attempt to show that such a method would indeed be a viable method of protecting embedded control systems. We first identify several issues with the original prototype, and present a new version of the program (dubbed Autoscopy Jr.) that uses trusted location lists to verify that control is coming from a known, trusted location inside our kernel. Although we encountered additional performance overhead when testing our new design, we developed a kernel profiler that allowed us to identify the probes responsible for this overhead and discard them, leaving us with a final probe list that generated less than 5% overhead on every one of our benchmark tests. Finally, we attempted to run Autoscopy Jr. on two specialized kernels (one with an optimized probing framework, and another with a hardening patch installed), finding that the former did not produce enough performance benefits to preclude using our profiler, and that the latter required a different method of scanning for indirect functions for Autoscopy Jr. to operate. We argue that Autoscopy Jr. is indeed a feasible intrusion detection system for embedded control systems, as it can adapt easily to a variety of system architectures and allows us to intelligently balance security and performance on these critical devices.

Comments

Originally posted in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Technical Report Series, number TR2011-704.

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