ICS security fails the Black Hat test

The news at Black Hat 2018 wasn't great when it came to industrial control systems. But while numerous sessions added up to sweeping condemnation of ICS security, there was at least the occasional saving grace that some vendors will correct some problems -- at least some of the time. Still, the apparent lack of a security-conscious culture within these organizations means they'll only fix the minimum, leaving similar products with the same underlying hardware, firmware and fatal bugs untouched and unsecured.

Speaking in a session, called "Breaking the IIoT: Hacking Industrial Control Gateways," Thomas Roth, security researcher and founder of Leveldown Security, an embedded and ICS security consulting and research company based in Esslingen, Germany, walked through the security faults of a series of five gateway devices he'd found at prices he could afford on eBay. He wanted to look at commonly deployed, relatively current devices -- things you find in the real world.

"If you go out on the network and start scanning, you'll find thousands of these devices. In fact, you'll find entire network ranges that are used almost exclusively for these devices," he said.

"Often, they use static IP addresses with no VPN protection." One device he looked at had a proprietary protocol for its wireless communications. But if you could break it -- and he did -- you had access to every one of those devices in the field, because the network addressing architecture was flat and unsegmented.

The first device he looked at was typical of his various experiments, tackling a Moxa W2150A which connects ICS devices to wireless networks via an Ethernet port on the device side and a wireless interface on the other side. In between the two interfaces is an easily opened case that reveals a circuit board with pads for connecting to a debugging port. Roth discovered, in a common theme across many of the devices discussed at the conference, the port was a serial terminal connection that booted directly to a root shell in Linux.

"This is a design decision, not a bug," Roth said. But he noted that if you have the device and you can access a root shell, then as you are writing exploits, you can debug them directly on the device, "which is a pretty nice situation to be in."

Roth noted the firmware for the device was available on the internet from the Moxa website, but it was encrypted. At first, this seemed like a dead end. But in looking at earlier firmware versions, he noticed one of the upgrades included adding the feature of encrypting the firmware.

This led him to an unencrypted update version, which included a package called "upgrade_firmware." This, in turn, led to a function called "firmware_decrypt" -- a function name that gave the audience a chuckle -- which gave him plaintext access to the current version of the software. The decryption key was, needless to say, included in the upgrade code.

Roth raised an issue that hasn't been much discussed in ICS security: supply chain security issues caused by the wide prevalence of openly accessible terminal access ports on devices. You can change the firmware, he said, write the changed version back to the device, return it to your distributor without mentioning the change, "and they will happily resell it to someone else." In fact, he knows this because he conducted an experiment and was sold a device with firmware he had previously rewritten.

Roth discussed four more devices in some detail, with two of them still in the process of disclosure, "and there are a lot of fun issues."

Beyond Roth's pathway strewn with pwned gateways, there were other such sessions, including ones that found significant vulnerabilities in medical devices, cellular gateways, smart city infrastructure and satellite communications.

Jonathan Butts, CEO of security consultancy QED Secure Solutions, located in Coppell, Texas, noted in a press conference at the event that dealing with vendors around ICS security disclosure had been particularly frustrating. In the case of a pacemaker made by Medtronic, a protracted process leading to the company deciding that changes in the product weren't necessary led Butts and co-speaker Billy Rios, founder of WhiteScope LLC, a cybersecurity company based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., to demonstrate their attack live and let the audience judge for themselves.

"To be honest," Butts said, "after about the one-and-a-half-year mark, and you see stuff like [Medtronic's response], you get fed up."