Citation
Branden Ghena, William Beyer, Allen Hillaker, Jonathan Pevarnek, Alex Halderman. "Green Lights Forever: Analyzing the Security of Traffic Infrastructure". USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT '14), 19, August, 2014.

Abstract
The safety critical nature of traffic infrastructure requires that it be secure against computer-based attacks, but this is not always the case. We investigate a networked traffic signal system currently deployed in the United States and discover a number of security flaws that exist due to systemic failures by the designers. We leverage these flaws to create attacks which gain control of the system, and we successfully demonstrate them on the deployment in coordination with authorities. Our attacks show that an adversary can control traffic infrastructure to cause disruption, degrade safety, or gain an unfair advantage. We make recommendations on how to improve existing systems and discuss the lessons learned for embedded systems security in general.

Electronic downloads

• Beyer_GreenLightsForever_WOOT14.pdf · application/pdf · 3227 kbytes
• https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14-ghena.pdf

• HTML

  Branden Ghena, William Beyer, Allen Hillaker, Jonathan
  Pevarnek, Alex Halderman. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/320.html"
  >Green Lights Forever: Analyzing the Security of Traffic
  Infrastructure</a>, USENIX Workshop on Offensive
  Technologies (WOOT '14), 19, August, 2014.

• Plain text

  Branden Ghena, William Beyer, Allen Hillaker, Jonathan
  Pevarnek, Alex Halderman. "Green Lights Forever:
  Analyzing the Security of Traffic Infrastructure".
  USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT '14), 19,
  August, 2014.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{GhenaBeyerHillakerPevarnekHalderman14_GreenLightsForeverAnalyzingSecurityOfTrafficInfrastructure,
      author = {Branden Ghena and William Beyer and Allen Hillaker
                and Jonathan Pevarnek and Alex Halderman},
      title = {Green Lights Forever: Analyzing the Security of
                Traffic Infrastructure},
      booktitle = {USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT
                '14)},
      day = {19},
      month = {August},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {The safety critical nature of traffic
                infrastructure requires that it be secure against
                computer-based attacks, but this is not always the
                case. We investigate a networked traffic signal
                system currently deployed in the United States and
                discover a number of security flaws that exist due
                to systemic failures by the designers. We leverage
                these flaws to create attacks which gain control
                of the system, and we successfully demonstrate
                them on the deployment in coordination with
                authorities. Our attacks show that an adversary
                can control traffic infrastructure to cause
                disruption, degrade safety, or gain an unfair
                advantage. We make recommendations on how to
                improve existing systems and discuss the lessons
                learned for embedded systems security in general. },
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/320.html}
  }
  

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 28 May 2014.