Stealthy Rootkits in Smart Grid Controllers This paper presents a stealthy and persistent attack on a CyberPhysical System (CPS), namely the smart grid and a multilayer approach to detect such an attack. The attack on the CPS controller uses a rootkitbased malware. When activated, the rootkit overwrites operator commands to the smart grid relays while evading detection by the operator control station. The rootkit sends valid replies to the operator while corrupting the controller operation through a dynamically loaded library, which is hidden by the rootkit. The attack persists even when the controller stops and restarts since the rootkit automatically restarts the process with the malicious library by using a background daemon, which the rootkit hides from userspace tools. Using a highfidelity simulation of the smart grid CPS, we show that the attack drastically impacts the CPS, especially when the adversary strategically chooses the target relays to attack. We design an ensemble of detectors to detect the attack and uncover its persistence and insertion mechanisms. The detector uses measures such as hardware performance counters (HPCs), change detection in binary signatures, change detection in system calls, and detection of hidden processes and file system entries.

Integrating CyberAttack Defense Techniques into RealTime CyberPhysical Systems With the rapid deployment of CyberPhysical Systems (CPS), security has become a more critical problem than ever before, as such devices are interconnected and have access to a broad range of critical data. A wellknown attack is ReturnOriented Programming (ROP) which can diverge the control flow of a program by exploiting the buffer overflow vulnerability. To protect a program from ROP attacks, a useful method is to instrument code into the protected program to do runtime control flow checking (known as Control Flow Integrity, CFI). However, instrumented code brings extra execution time, which has to be properly handled, as most CPS systems need to behave in a realtime manner. In this paper, we present a technique to efficiently compute an execution plan, which maximizes the number of executions of instrumented code to achieve maximal defense effect, and at the same time guarantees realtime schedulability of the protected task system with a new response time analysis. Simulationbased experimental results show that the proposed method can yield good quality execution plans, but performs orders of magnitude faster than exhaustive search. We also built a prototype in which a small autodrive car is defended against ROP attacks by the proposed method implemented in FreeRTOS. The prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in reallife scenarios.