Researcher Challenges Siemens' Public Reaction To New SCADA Flaws

A researcher who late last week pulled his planned public presentation on some newly discovered and deadly SCADA bugs contends that Siemens is unfairly attempting to publicly downplay the flaws and the nature of their exploitability.

Dillon Beresford, a researcher with NSS Labs, canceled his talk at TakedownCon 2011 in Dallas at the eleventh hour due to concerns about the contents' possible risk to human life. He had planned to reveal vulnerabilities and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for flaws in Siemens SCADA industrial-control systems products.

Details of the research and on the bugs themselves are being closely held by Beresford, his colleagues, ICS-CERT, and Siemens, but the description of the so-called "Chain Reactions—Hacking SCADA" presentation certainly raised alarm and interest: "Combining traditional exploits with industrial control systems allows attackers to weaponize malicious code, as demonstrated with Stuxnet. The attacks against Iran's nuclear facilities were started by a sequence of events that delayed the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"We will demonstrate how motivated attackers could penetrate even the most heavily fortified facilities in the world, without the backing of a nation state," the description continues. "We will also present how to write industrial grade malware without having direct access to the target hardware. After all, if physical access was required, what would be the point of hacking into an industrial control system?"

In posts to the SCADASec security mailing list today, Beresford noted that while he is free to give his presentation at any time, he'll wait until it's safe to do so given the potential ramifications. He said in a post today that "until the products are fixed and the patches have been carefully validated the presentation will remain out of the public domain. As for a definitive timetable on patches, who knows..."

Beresford and NSS Labs had been collaborating as of last week with Siemens and ICS-CERT to come up with fixes for the flaws. But, according to NSS Labs, the fixes Siemens came up with didn't do the job.

Meanwhile, Beresford has taken issue with a statement Siemens issued that says the bugs were found "under special laboratory conditions with unlimited access to protocols and controllers." The researcher contends that the bugs are not difficult to exploit: "I put the code into a series of Metasploit auxiliary modules, the same ones supplied to ICS-CERT and Siemens. For the explicit purpose of helping ICS-CERT and Siemens CERT in validating the vulnerabilities and the IMPACT of these vulns. These modules were going to be demonstrated during my presentation, not released until patches went out, but demonstrated for the 300 people who flew into Dallas, TX to see my presentation," Beresford said in a post today.

He says the "security feature" suggested by Siemens to remedy the vulnerabilities failed because he was able to bypass it within 45 minutes. Beresford says he notified the vendor and ICS-CERT of that finding. "I knew the feature was flawed from the moment they proposed the solution and explained it to me, because I broke much more than the PLCs," he said. The researcher used real controllers in his research, he said.

Siemens had not responded to press inquiries as of this posting.

ICS-CERT and Siemens were provided with details of the vulnerabilities and PoC exploits, and that both ICS-CERT and Siemens confirmed the NSS Labs discovery, according to NSS Labs.

NSS Labs says there are mitigation techniques that ICS operators can deploy prior to any patches. "Due to the serious physical and financial impact these issues could have on a worldwide basis, details are only being made on a restricted basis. Owners/operators of leading SCADA PLCs may contact us for further information and remediation advice," the company said in a statement.

But Beresford is not happy with the way Siemens is handling things PR-wise in the wake of the decision to hold off on disclosing the bugs. "The clock is ticking and time is of the essence. I expect more from a company worth $80 billion and so do your customers," Beresford said in his post.

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