A post that recently caught our eye, titled “Dozens of exploits released for popular SCADA programs” by Dan Goodin at theregister.co.uk, reveals that SCADA systems may not be as secure as some people think. In the article, Luigi Auriemma, one of the researchers who released the vulnerabilities, stated that “SCADA is a critical field but nobody really cares about it.”
SCADA, or “Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition”, refers to industrial control systems which monitor, control and collect data from industrial, infrastructure, or facility-based processes. SCADA systems are found at the heart of many industries including Water Management Systems, Electric Power, Traffic Signals, Mass Transit Systems, and Manufacturing Systems. As you could guess, an exploit in one of these areas’ industrial processes could have an immense impact, and should be taken seriously.
Not only do SCADA systems need to be concerned with remote code execution, but the security of data being transferred between the SCADA sensor and the host computer is very important as well. To secure this data link, SCADA systems may use SSL/TLS to encrypt all traffic between the sensor and server. CyaSSL is an ideal SSL/TLS solution for this type of system. The CyaSSL embedded ssl library has been optimized for embedded environments and devices, and is able to provide the best possible SSL/TLS encryption while offering a small footprint and fast speeds.
For more information about the released SCADA vulnerabilities, see the links below. For information regarding the CyaSSL embedded SSL/TLS library, please contact us at info@yassl.com.
Wikipedia (SCADA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCADA
theregister.co.uk Article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/scada_exploits_released/
Luigi Auriemma’s Post Listing Vulnerabilities: http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2011/Mar/187