19 November 2016

During my daily check of the Department of Homeland Security’s ICS-CERT Advisory Feed I found an interesting report that deals with a vulnerability in a family of Schneider Electric Power Meters. I researched similar advisories and the corresponding product manuals.

From that I derived some basic rules for the design of Industrial IoT (IIoT) Devices:

1. Factory default for all network adapters of IIoT devices is DISABLED.
2. As soon as a network adapter is enabled the user is forced to reset the password of the device and of all inbuilt users to non-trivial values. The embedded operating system should check at least against the ‘25 worst passwords’ published in the year of manufacturing.
3. A reset to trivial passwords shall be rejected by the embedded operating system.
4. The vendors guarantee that IIoT devices are free of Backdoor accounts.
5. All network connections shall be encrypted by default.

With this, the risk of cyber-attacks against IIoT devices is dramatically reduced. And, if built-in during design phase, the production costs will increase, if at all, only moderately.

Have a good weekend.