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Modbus is a widely-used industrial protocol in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for different purposes such as controlling remote devices, monitoring physical processes, data acquisition, etc. Unfortunately, such a protocol lacks security means i.e., authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. This has exposed industrial plants using the Modbus protocol and made them attractive to malicious adversaries who could perform various kinds of cyber-attacks causing significant consequences as Stuxnet showed. In this paper, we exploit the insecurity of the Modbus protocol and perform a stealthy false command injection scenario concealing our injection from the SCADA operator. Our attack approach is comprised of two main phases: 1) Pre-attack phase (offline) where an attacker sniffs, collects and stores sufficient valid request-response pairs in a database, 2) Attack phase (online) where the attacker performs false command injection and conceals his injection by replaying a valid response from his database upon each request sent from the HMI user. Such a scenario is quite severe and might cause disastrous damages in SCADA systems and critical infrastructures if it is successfully implemented by malicious adversaries. Finally, we suggest some appropriate mitigation solutions to prevent such a serious threat.
Neighbourhood watch is a concept that allows a community to distribute a complex security task in between all members. Members of the community carry out individual security tasks to contribute to the overall security of it. It reduces the workload of a particular individual while securing all members and allowing them to carry out a multitude of security tasks. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of resource-constraint independent battery driven computers as nodes communicating wirelessly. Security in WSNs is essential. Without sufficient security, an attacker is able to eavesdrop the communication, tamper monitoring results or deny critical nodes providing their service in a way to cut off larger network parts. The resource-constraint nature of sensor nodes prevents them from running full-fledged security protocols. Instead, it is necessary to assess the most significant security threats and implement specialised protocols. A neighbourhood-watch inspired distributed security scheme for WSNs has been introduced by Langend\"orfer. Its goal is to increase the variety of attacks a WSN can fend off. A framework of such complexity has to be designed in multiple steps. Here, we introduce an approach to determine distributions of security means on large-scale static homogeneous WSNs. Therefore, we model WSNs as undirected graphs in which two nodes connected iff they are in transmission range. The framework aims to partition the graph into $n$ distinct security means resulting in the targeted distribution. The underlying problems turn out to be NP hard and we attempt to solve them using linear programs (LPs). To evaluate the computability of the LPs, we generate large numbers of random {\lambda}-precision unit disk graphs (UDGs) as representation of WSNs. For this purpose, we introduce a novel {\lambda}-precision UDG generator to model WSNs with a minimal distance in between nodes.
Energy efficiency is a key factor for the longevity of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most representatives of the plants have evolved to be highly energy-efficient in their survival strategies, despite their limited resources. Plants have to deal with a variety of threats originating from different herbivores and microbial pathogens while handling a number of abiotic stress factors. For plants and WSNs, different defence mechanisms impose different fitness costs and therefore the costs and benefits have to be well-balanced. This way, plants are able to not only conquer a large variety of different attacks but also handle several different simultaneous attacks adequately. To react early and adapt to upcoming threats, plants within a network are capable of signalling each other within a certain distance about ongoing attacks. The biological strategies of plants in terms of signalling and defence, as well as their energy and resource limitations, share significant similarities with WSNs. This study aims to explore these similarities and demonstrates the correspondence between the biological concepts and WSNs. Additionally, we present a novel approach to enhancing security in WSNs through a cooperative distributed security scheme inspired by key factors of plant defence mechanisms, with the goal of reducing the energy constraints and maximising the longevity of the network.