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HEAR the word 鈥渃yberattack鈥�, and gas pipelines, factories and power stations aren鈥檛 necessarily the first targets that spring to mind. But such facilities are often controlled by software that lacks the appropriate defences.
Now the cybersecurity company Kaspersky Labs based in Moscow, Russia, is developing an operating system that it claims will block hacker or malware attacks on critical infrastructure.
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Such attacks are not merely a theoretical possibility. In 2010, the Stuxnet worm, which some observers suspect was developed by US and Israeli intelligence agencies, exploited vulnerabilities in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software. The worm wrecked hundreds of centrifuges at Iran鈥檚 Natanz nuclear facility, temporarily derailing its uranium enrichment programme.
Eugene Kaspersky, the firm鈥檚 co-founder, says its secure operating system by stopping SCADA software from sending malicious commands to programmable logic controllers. PLCs are specialised computers that operate pumps, relays, motors, vents, circuit breakers and other industrial equipment.
SCADA software often runs on Windows-based PCs. To avoid downtime, these computers are rarely given software updates and antivirus patches 鈥� making them vulnerable to attack. Kaspersky鈥檚 solution is to build dedicated to running SCADA software and controlling PLCs. It will be built from scratch 鈥� so will be not be based on existing software 鈥� and will contain a bare minimum of code, making it possible to verify mathematically that the system is free of vulnerabilities that could be exploited in an attack.
Focusing on the operating system may be the wrong approach, says Ralph Langner, a cybersecurity consultant based in Hamburg, Germany. He was the first person to work out how Stuxnet launched its assault, and says we should instead be concentrating on making SCADA software and PLCs more resistant to attack. 鈥淭he security problems of production plant controllers are not at the operating system level, they are at the application level 鈥� and Kaspersky doesn鈥檛 even talk about that,鈥� he says.
鈥淔ortifying operating systems, like robust versions of Linux, only helps against some primitive attacks,鈥� agrees Victor Sheymov, a former Soviet KGB cryptographer who defected to the US in 1980.
Sheymov also reckons that whatever the pros and cons of Kaspersky鈥檚 approach, many firms will not buy into it because of concerns over a Russian company supplying critical control software. 鈥淚n the west, we cannot guarantee that the computer products of any Russian company can be free of a back door to the Russian government,鈥� he told New 杏吧原创.
