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SlotSwapper: a schedule randomization protocol for real-time WirelessHART networks

Published: 06 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Industrial process control systems are time-critical systems where reliable communications between sensors and actuators need to be guaranteed within strict deadlines to maintain safe operation of all the components of the system. WirelessHART is the most widely adopted standard which serves as the medium of communication in industrial setups due to its support for Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based communication, multiple channels, channel hopping, centralized architecture, redundant routes and avoidance of spatial re-use of channels. However, the communication schedule in WirelessHART network is decided by a centralized network manager at the time of network initialization and the same communication schedule repeats every hyper-period. Due to predictability in the time slots of the communication schedule, these systems are vulnerable to timing attacks which eventually can disrupt the safety of the system. In this work, we present a moving target defense mechanism, the SlotSwapper, which uses schedule randomization techniques to randomize the time slots over a hyper-period schedule, while still preserving all the feasibility constraints of a real-time WirelessHART network and makes the schedule uncertain every hyper-period. We tested the feasibility of the generated schedules on random topologies with 100 simulated motes in Cooja simulator. We use schedule entropy to measure the confidentiality of our algorithm in terms of randomness in the time slots of the generated schedules.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Online Distributed Schedule Randomization to Mitigate Timing Attacks in Industrial Control SystemsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/362458422:6(1-39)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Online Schedule Randomization to Mitigate Timing Attacks in 5G Periodic URLLC CommunicationsACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/360009319:4(1-26)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
  • (2023)Revealing Smart Selective Jamming Attacks in WirelessHART NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.322435831:4(1611-1625)Online publication date: Aug-2023
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGBED Review
ACM SIGBED Review  Volume 16, Issue 4
Special Issue on International Workshop on Real-Time Networks (RTN 19)
December 2019
30 pages
EISSN:1551-3688
DOI:10.1145/3378408
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 January 2020
Published in SIGBED Volume 16, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. WirelessHART
  2. entropy
  3. randomization
  4. schedule

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Online Distributed Schedule Randomization to Mitigate Timing Attacks in Industrial Control SystemsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/362458422:6(1-39)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Online Schedule Randomization to Mitigate Timing Attacks in 5G Periodic URLLC CommunicationsACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/360009319:4(1-26)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
  • (2023)Revealing Smart Selective Jamming Attacks in WirelessHART NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2022.322435831:4(1611-1625)Online publication date: Aug-2023
  • (2022)Configuration Security for Sustainable Digital Twins of Industrial Automation and Control Systems in Emerging CountriesAI and IoT for Sustainable Development in Emerging Countries10.1007/978-3-030-90618-4_12(233-253)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2022
  • (2021)Formal Security Evaluation and Improvement of Wireless HART Protocol in Industrial Wireless NetworkSecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2021/80905472021Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
  • (2021)Launching Smart Selective Jamming Attacks in WirelessHART NetworksIEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488805(1-10)Online publication date: 10-May-2021
  • (2020)A schedule randomization policy to mitigate timing attacks in WirelessHART networksReal-Time Systems10.1007/s11241-020-09354-z56:4(452-489)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2020

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