Error Code

Can your OT function if the IT system goes down? OT self-sufficiency is critical for infrastructure such as rail systems. Christopher Warner, from GuidePoint Security, discusses how this infrastructure resilience is important not only for the rail industry but for most of the other critical infrastructures in general.   

Quantum computers will change and even break the cryptography we have today. To defeat a "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" strategy by bad actors (even nation states), Denis Mandich, CTO and co-founder of Qrypt, is proposing a type of crypto agility that compiles the keys on your laptop instead of distributing them across the internet. He also talks about how you won’t need a quantum computer in your home; you’ll be able to access one in the cloud the way you can access AWS today.

When we think of massive compute power, we think of the Cloud when we really should consider the millions of unprotected OT devices with even greater slack computer power than all our current Cloud services combined. Sonu Shankar, Vice President of Product at Phosphorus Cybersecurity, talks about the challenge of communicating with PLCs and other devices, the risks from newer OT devices, and how all password-less OT devices really need to be protected. He says attacks aren’t just DDoS; today OT attacks can exfiltrate data as well.

There’s much of the electromagnetic spectrum that we cannot see. Like how LED wristbands are triggered at concerts or how to identify someone at DEF CON in a crowd of cellphones and electrical devices. Eric Escobar of SecureWorks provides some really clear analogies to help anyone visualize the differences between NFC, Bluetooth, and Wi Fi such as how your router and your microwave are both 2.4GHz - the difference is the number of watts behind each signal.

How might we mitigate the risk to millions of unauthenticated devices already out in the field?  Ron Fabela, Field CTO at XONA Systems, has some ideas about how to achieve zero trust in either legacy or new OT systems. Really, it’s just a matter of reducing the attack surface.

In a talk at Black Hat USA 2023, Sharon Brizinov and Noam Moshe from Claroty Team82, disclosed a significant vulnerability in the Open Platform Communications Universal Architecture or OPC-UA, a univsersal protocol used to synchronize different OT devices. In this episode they also discuss a new open source OPC exploit framework designed to help OT vendors check their devices in development. Transcript.

What would happen if someone stole the encryption keys for a major satellite? Well, it’d be game over. Unless the satellite used quantum cryptography. Skip Sanzeri from QuSecure explains how using “quantum tunnels” will allow even legacy satellites in orbit today to become secure in a rapidly approaching post-quantum world.

This is a story of what's needed for the Capture The Flag competition at DEF CON 31 to be hosted for the first time on a live satellite orbiting 400 kilometers above the Earth. Mike Walker continues his conversation, focusing more on the game to be played in Hack-A-Sat 4.

Moonlighter is the world’s first and only hacking sandbox in space. Currently orbiting the earth near the International Space Station, the satellite is the playground for this year’s Hack-A-Sat 4 competition at DEF CON 31. Mike Walker, from Cromulence, discusses the difference between hacking a live satellite in orbit vs the previous Hack-A-Sat CTFs which only simulated the experience. We discuss limited contact windows, latency, and other aspects of orbital mechanics which will surely influence how Hack-a-Sat 4 will be played.

Could a personal medical device be a threat for an organization? Turns out it’s similar to protecting against an attack on a mobile device. Except a denial of service here could prove fatal. Todd Brasel, the author of Security Issues of Personal Medical Devices: Concerns, Characteristics, and Controls, discusses with Error Code the research he’s done on devices either inside the body or just outside, the vulnerabilities in communications they sometimes have, and the mitigations available today.