Integration of safety and security in railway systems (original) (raw)
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Cybersecurity-The Forgotten Issue in Railways: Security Can Be Woven into Safety Designs
IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, 2018
This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. 2 ||| 1556-6072/18©2018ieee ieee vehicular technology magazine | march 2018 M ost critical applications today depend on computers, so a computer failure can cause financial disaster, serious injury, or even death. In this context, railways are considered a critical application, so they must meet the highest standards of availability and safety. Availability ensures continuous operation of the system, while a safe system must behave correctly in all operating and environmental conditions. But what happens if an external attack compromises the availability and/or safety of the system? In railways today, cybersecurity is not considered to be as important as safety-but a cybersecurity threat can lead to safety problems. Moreover, current railway standards dealing with the development of security modules are just general or only recommendations, unlike railway safety standards for developing electronic devices, which are both general and particular. This article shows the current cyberthreats that affect the railway transport network, presents a general analysis about the standards used in security compared with those used in safety, and describes some recommendations to improve cybersecurity. Overwhelming Focus on Safety According to the definition provided in [1], safety is defined as "the degree to which accidental harm is prevented, detected, and reacted to." The same source also defines security as "the degree to which malicious harm is prevented, detected, and reacted to." One useful example to understand the difference is a public office building: the smoke detectors are safety devices to prevent accidental harm, and the turnstile and control access are security devices to prevent malicious harm. One of the most popular components of security is cybersecurity, which focuses on protecting networks, computers, and data from unauthorized access. Railways and other transportation systems are considered safety-critical applications, i.e., systems, the failure of which may result in human disaster of one sort or another. A failure occurs when an application or system is not able to guarantee its required function. While safety-critical applications are not necessarily controlled by computers, as application complexity matures, computers become much more reliable than humans for performing safety tasks. So it is not surprising that computers are increasingly replacing humans for such tasks. Therefore, since most
Railway Security Issues: A Survey of Developing Railway Technology
2000
Transportation systems are increasingly under scrutiny with respect to potential vulnerabilities. As part of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (19), threats and vulnerabilities to cyberspace are being identified and remediated. Primarily the discussion has focused on physical security or the security of those systems that are well known to be heavily dependent upon electronics, such as avionic systems. Transportations
Security as a Safety Issue in Rail Communications
2004
Systems whose failure can lead to the damage of property or the environment, or loss of human life are regarded as safety-critical systems. It is no longer adequate to build safety-critical systems based on the control of errors and failures alone. Safetycritical systems must also deal ...
Securing the Future Railway System: Technology Forecast, Security Measures, and Research Demands
Vehicles
The railway industry—traditionally a conservative industry with low adaption speed for innovation—is currently entering its digitization phase. The sector faces a challenge in integrating new technologies and approaches into the employed—often safety-critical—systems. Keeping the systems secure while conforming to the demanding safety norms creates previously unknown problems. In the last decades, the number of attacks on the railway system has increased. Furthermore, with standardized digital technologies, the attack surface will keep growing. Therefore, in this work, we look into the foreseeable future of the railway system and present 21 likely use cases. We analyze these use cases regarding possible threats, rate the severity of these threats, and deduce and rate necessary countermeasures. To this end, we model these use cases and the corresponding threats and countermeasures using Attack Graphs. We use a graphical solution for the risk and security analysis due to advantages ov...
Cybersecurity for eMaintenance in railway infrastructure: risks and consequences
International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management, 2019
Recently, due to the advancements in the Information and Communication Technology, there has been lot of emphasis on digitization of the existing and newly developed infrastructure. In transportation infrastructure, in general, 80% of the assets are already in place and there has been tremendous push to move to the digital era. For efficient and effective design, construction, operation and maintenance of the infrastructure, due to this digitization, there is increasing research trend in data-driven decision-making algorithms that are proved to be effective because of several advantages. Since railway is the backbone of the society, the data-driven approaches will ensure the continuous operation, efficient maintenance, planning and potential future investments. The breach and leak of this potential data to the wrong hands might result in havoc, risk, trust, hazards and serious consequences. Hence, the main purpose of this paper is to stress the potential challenges, consequences, threats, vulnerabilities and risk management of data security in the railway infrastructure in context of eMaintenance. In addition, this paper also identifies the research methods to obtain and secure this data for potential possible research.
Security Requirements Engineering in Safety-Critical Railway Signalling Networks
Security and Communication Networks, 2019
Securing a safety-critical system is a challenging task, because safety requirements have to be considered alongside security controls. We report on our experience to develop a security architecture for railway signalling systems starting from the bare safety-critical system that requires protection. We use a threat-based approach to determine security risk acceptance criteria and derive security requirements. We discuss the executed process and make suggestions for improvements. Based on the security requirements, we develop a security architecture. The architecture is based on a hardware platform that provides the resources required for safety as well as security applications and is able to run these applications of mixed-criticality (safety-critical applications and other applications run on the same device). To achieve this, we apply the MILS approach, a separation-based high-assurance security architecture to simplify the safety case and security case of our approach. We descri...
Railway cyber-security in the era of interconnected systems: a survey
Cornell University - arXiv, 2022
Technological advances in the telecommunications industry have brought significant advantages in the management and performance of communication networks. The railway industry, where signaling systems are now fully computerized, is among the ones that have benefited the most. These interconnected systems, however, have a wide area exposed to cyberattacks. This survey examines the cybersecurity aspects of railway signaling systems by considering the standards, guidelines, and frameworks most widely used in the industry. We dedicate specific attention to communication networks since data communication systems are essential to signaling architectures. To this end, we explore using dedicated cyber ranges as an enabling technology to model attacks to computer networks, emulate attack-defense scenarios, study vulnerabilities impact in general, and finally devise countermeasures to them.
Cyber Resilience of Railway Signaling Systems
Recently published information on the cybersecurity assessment of railway computer and communication-based control systems (CBCS) identified several weaknesses and vulnerabilities, which allow threat agents to not only degrade system reliability and bypass safety mechanisms, but to carry out attacks which directly affect the rail traffic safety. Despite these findings, remarkably these systems meet all relevant IT security and functional safety requirements and have the required international, national and industrial certificates. The paper shows the link between information security and industrial. Railroads is a complex systems and process automation is used in different areas: to control power, switches, signals and locomotives. At this paper author analyze threats and vulnerabilities of fundamental railroad automation systems such as computer based interlocking, automatic train control and automatic train protection. All examples based on hands-on security exercises and most of issues are confirmed and processed by vendors.
2018
In critical infrastructures such as railway systems, the continuous and resilient availability of safety critical functions residing on actuator and sensor components must be ensured. Since these components are also more and more connected using the Internet Protocol (IP), they additionally require security functions to provide protection against attackers. Moreover, the railway infrastructure is highly distributed, with its critical components residing at the track side easily accessible to attackers. Thus, a continuous proofing that the safety-critical systems are not manipulated is required, too. The (safety) certification of such safety-critical systems covers both the hardware components and corresponding software components that compose a specific safety-critical application. Since security functions are currently not in use, they are not part of the certification. However, the integration of security functions is imperative to provide the basis for preventing or detecting m...
SECURITY SYSTEMS FOR RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE USING INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT SYSTEMS
This paper discussed the importance of using information and communication technology on railway infrastructure for safety and securing lives and properties. It defined terrorism and gave examples of terrorist attack on railway. It recommended the architecture framework to be in place for the installation of intelligent transport systems.