Zhdanova, Maria (2022)
Security and Trust in Safety Critical Infrastructures.
Technische Universität Darmstadt
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00021505
Dissertation, Erstveröffentlichung, Verlagsversion

Kurzbeschreibung (Abstract)

Critical infrastructures such as road vehicles and railways are undergoing a major change, which increases the dependency of their operation and control on Information Technology (IT) and makes them more vulnerable to malicious intent. New complex communication infrastructures emerge using the increased connectivity of these safety-critical systems to enable efficient management of operational processes, service provisioning, and information exchange for various (third-party) actors. Railway Command and Control Systems (CCSs) turn with the introduction of digital interlocking into an “Internet of Railway Things”, where safety-critical railway signaling components are deployed on common-purpose platforms and connected via standard IP-based networks. Similarly, the mass adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the need to supply their batteries with energy for charging has given rise to a Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) infrastructure, which connects vehicles to power grids and multiple service providers to coordinate charging and discharging processes and maintain grid stability under varying power demands. The Plug-and-Charge feature brought in by the V2G communication standard ISO 15118 allows an EV to access charging and value-added services, negotiate charging schedules, and support the grid as a distributed energy resource in a largely automated way, by leveraging identity credentials installed in the vehicle for authentication and payment.

The fast deployment of this advanced functionality is driven by economical and political decisions including the EU Green Deal for climate neutrality. Due to the complex requirements and long standardization and development cycles, the standards and regulations, which play the key role in operating and protecting critical infrastructures, are under pressure to enable the timely and cost-effective adoption.

In this thesis, we investigate security and safety of future V2G and railway command and control systems with respect to secure communication, platform assurance as well as safety and security co-engineering. One of the major goals in this context is the continuous collaboration and establishment of the proposed security solutions in upcoming domain-specific standards, thus ensuring their practical applicability and prompt implementation in real-world products.

We first analyze the security of V2G communication protocols and requirements for secure service provisioning via charging connections. We propose a new Plug-and-Patch protocol that enables secure update of EVs as a value-added service integrated into the V2G charging loop. Since EVs can also participate in energy trading by storing and feeding previously stored energy to grid, home, or other vehicles, we then investigate fraud detection methods that can be employed to identify manipulations and misbehaving users.

In order to provide a strong security foundation for V2G communications, we propose and analyze three security architectures employing a hardware trust anchor to enable trust establishment in V2G communications. We integrate these architectures into standard V2G protocols for load management, e-mobility services and value-added services in the V2G infrastructure, and evaluate the associated performance and security trade-offs.

The final aspect of this work is safety and security co-engineering, i.e., integration of safety and security processes vital for the adequate protection of connected safety-critical systems. We consider two application scenarios, Electric Vehicle Charging System (EVCS) and Object Controller (OC) in railway CCS, and investigate how security methods like trusted computing can be applied to provide both required safety and security properties. In the case of EVCS, we bind the trust boundary for safety functionality (certified configuration) to the trust boundary in the security domain and design a new security architecture that enforces safety properties via security assertions. For the railway use case, we focus on ensuring non-interference (separation) between these two domains and develop a security architecture that allows secure co-existence of applications with different criticality on the same hardware platform.

The proposed solutions have been presented to the committee ISO/TC 22/SC 31/JWG 1 that develops the ISO 15118 standard series and to the DKE working group “Informationssicherheit für Elektromobilität” responsible for the respective application guidelines. Our security extension has been integrated in the newest edition ISO 15118-20 released in April 2022. Several manufacturers have already started concept validation for their future products using our results.

In this way, the presented analyses and techniques are fundamental contributions in improving the state of security for e-mobility and railway applications, and the overall resilience of safety-critical infrastructures to malicious attacks.

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