With the increasing number of energy aware devices, energy management solutions can provide the necessary means to visualize, overlook and automate devices as well as communication with external services. To protect users from malicious attacks and data abuse, security and privacy aspects need to be included into the design and implementation from the very beginning. Within the AnyPLACE solution, we set out to create a security and privacy centric energy management solution. We present a survey of best practice guidelines and EU-wide security and privacy regulatory frameworks including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Based on the results of our survey, we defined implementation requirements and present the security and privacy architecture of the AnyPLACE implementation.

Recent developments under the term Smart Grid change how users consume electricity and interact with the power grid. Smart metering and energy management are developments that transform the yet passive energy consumer to a participant that is actively involved in the energy market by using variable energy tariffs or by demand-response services. But such functionality demands a platform that integrates all smart devices in the users property, connects to external services and electricity providers, and has interfaces that provide information and control to the user. AnyPLACE will develop such platform. Based on the latest legislation in the European member states, it will incorporate smart meters and create links to external service providers. Furthermore, it connects the devices in the property of the end-user in order to be able to fully monitor and control the energy consumption. This paper presents the AnyPLACE idea and the problems that are solved on the communications aspect. It provides an in-depth analysis of current European legislation in the context of smart metering and provides the requirements that need to be realized by the platform. Additionally, it proposes a strategy to create a solution that can be used in any place of Europe. The paper also incorporates the security and privacy requirements in different domains and sketches a solution and architecture to fulfill these by incorporating existing open source implementations as provided by the openHAB project.

Integrated Circuit (IC) device manufacturing is a challenging task and often results in subtle defects that can render a chip unusable. To detect these defects at multiple stages during the IC production process, test modes are inserted (Design For Testability). On the downside, attackers can use these test modes to break IC device security and extract sensitive information such as the firmware implementation or secret key material. While in high security smart cards the testing circuits are physically removed during production for this reason, in the majority of digital ICs the testing modes remain intact. Often they are undocumented, well-hidden and contain secret test commands. Utilizing search algorithms and/or side channel information, several attacks on secret testing modes have been presented lately. Accordingly, countermeasures that frequently rely on obfuscation techniques have been proposed as more advanced cryptographic methods would require significantly more space on the die and thus cause higher production costs. In this work, we show that limited effort silicon reverse engineering can be effectively used to discover secret testing modes and that proposed obfuscation based countermeasures can be circumvented without altering the analysis technique. We describe our approach in detail at the example of a proprietary cryptographic game authentication chip of a well known gaming console and present an FPGA implementation of the previously secret authentication algorithm.

Embedded systems are an integral part of almost every electronic product today. From consumer electronics to industrial components in SCADA systems, their possible fields of application are manifold. While especially in industrial and critical infrastructures the security requirements are high, recent publications have shown that embedded systems do not cope well with this demand. One of the reasons is that embedded systems are being less scrutinized as embedded security analysis is considered to be more time consuming and challenging in comparison to PC systems. One of the key challenges on proprietary, resource constrained embedded devices is dynamic code analysis. The devices typically do not have the capabilities for a full-scale dynamic security evaluation. Likewise, the analyst cannot execute the software implementation inside a virtual machine due to the missing peripheral hardware that is required by the software to run. In this paper, we present PROSPECT, a system that can overcome these shortcomings and enables dynamic code analysis of embedded binary code inside arbitrary analysis environments. By transparently forwarding peripheral hardware accesses from the original host system into a virtual machine, PROSPECT allows security analysts to run the embedded software implementation without the need to know which and how embedded peripheral hardware components are accessed. We evaluated PROSPECT with respect to the performance impact and conducted a case study by doing a full-scale security audit of a widely used commercial fire alarm system in the building automation domain. Our results show that PROSPECT is both practical and usable for real-world application.

The introduction of smart grids goes along with an extensive use of ICT technologies in order to support the integration of renewable energy sources. However, the use of ICT technologies bears risks in terms of cyber security attacks which could negatively affect the electrical power grid. These risks need to be assessed, mitigated and managed in a proper way to ensure the security of both current and future energy networks. Existing approaches have been either restricted to very specific components of the smart grid (e.g., smart meters), or provide a high-level view only. We therefore propose an architecture-driven security management approach for smart grids which goes beyond a mere abstract view without focusing too much on technical details. Our approach covers architecture modeling, risk identification and assessment as well as risk mitigation and compliance checking. We have proven the practical usability of this process together with leading manufacturers and utilities.

Today, a large amount of software products include mechanisms to counter software piracy. However, most protection mechanisms can be easily circumvented by applying software patches (cracks) or license key generators (keygens) with seemingly no financial incentives. Our research shows that the distribution of cracks and keygens not only allows miscreants to generate revenue (e.g. through advertising or malware infections), but it also leads to high risks for the end-users of pirated software. We collected more than 43,900 download links and analyzed more than 23,100 (3,551 unique) real-world cracks, showing that these tools are heavily used by criminals to spread malware. Our results indicate that even state of the art virus scanners can not fully protect users from these threats. Moreover, we conducted a manual analysis, showing how many cracks and keygens actually work and how much effort is necessary to acquire them. In addition, we made our data-set publicly available to the research community.