Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks

https://www.itworldcanada.com/post/cisco-aids-ukraine-in-cyber-defense-with-modified-switches-to-counter-russian-attacks

by Logans_Run • 3 years ago

112 76 3 years ago

itworldcanada.com

mellow-lake-day• 3 years ago

The reliance of Ukraine’s substations on GPS for time synchronization, a standard in industrial control systems for its accuracy and affordability, becomes a vulnerability when faced with such jamming.
Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions. This solution employs the Cisco Industrial Ethernet switch with an internal crystal oscillator, enabling new clock recovery algorithms for accurate timekeeping when GPS is unavailable.

That's really neat. Didn't know GPS was also used for time synchronization.

whalesalad3• 3 years ago

It’s really the only way to do accurate time.

gambiting• 3 years ago

Well no, it isn't - it's just that every other solution is several orders of magnitude more expensive.

skybrian• 3 years ago

Radio clocks [1] often don’t use GPS. Many countries have a radio signal they can pick up. In the continental US, it comes from Fort Collins, Colorado. [2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB

femto• 3 years ago

Precision Time Protocol [1] is an alternative. CERN has been using it as part of a project to achieve sub-nanosecond accuracy over a wired network [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_Project

Andaith2• 3 years ago

Bit horrifying if you ask me, because I bet that happens everywhere. So if we lose GPS, we lose electricity? Awesome. Not at all fragile.

sneak3• 3 years ago

The electric grid is already extremely fragile. Its uptime is dependent on constant maintenance and repairs and many people on 24/7 standby to make more repairs in outages.

Its resilience is in the support network, not in the physical structures itself.

That support network building custom hardware in a GPS outage is that system functioning as expected. A GPS outage without a bunch of concerned humans doing everything they can to fix it isn’t going to happen.

calamari40653• 3 years ago

There's only two ways you can lose GPS from a fixed location: local jamming, or all of the satellites getting disabled somehow.

A jammer will typically be detected and stopped before any damage is done. Even owning a GPS jammer is illegal in most places.

All of the satellites going down is probably a cataclysmic scenario, like global nuclear war or solar flares. Not worth worrying about because you'll have much bigger problems.

GPS is one of the most reliable systems there is. There are redundant constellations of satellites run by different companies in different countries. It'd be near impossible to disrupt service from all of them at once.

twelve403• 3 years ago

"hindering the identification of issues like line breaks" doesn't quite sound like completely losing electricity.

calamari40653• 3 years ago

Basically, GPS satellites need ridiculous precision in their clocks to make navigation work. They all have atomic reference clocks to accomplish this.

Since GPS satellites are already broadcasting a ridiculously precise signal to the entire planet for free, it makes a lot of sense to use that signal when you need very precise time.

Though in cases like this where critical infrastructure is involved, I'm confused why they don't have an adequate clock source locally. You don't usually rely totally on GPS, you use it as a reference to check your local clock against.

lmz• 3 years ago

More to the point, all GPS satellites broadcast the time - the receiver takes the multiple (different) times from multiple satellites and the satellite's known location to determine the receiver's location.

instagib2• 3 years ago

It’s related to power generation. Finding line faults, keeping equipment at 60hz or 50hz whatever they use there.

They need precision location information for multiple power plants. They can do without it but you end up with dirty power which most equipment doesn’t like very much and some will shut off and not work at all or break.

I remember UK had an issue where they produced low frequency power and everyone’s kettles started turning on early due to the clock mismatch. https://medium.com/drax/what-is-electrical-frequency-and-why...

technofiend• 3 years ago

Politics aside, if there was ever a time for an Apollo-like moonshot program to build secure infrastructure and write secure code, it's now. Thanks to wide dissemination of techniques, Attack As A Service and even AI-assisted hacking, the bar to mount attacks just keeps getting lower. The real answer is to build resilient systems with zero backdoors rather than trying to put the hacking genie back in its proverbial bottle.

jakobson145• 3 years ago

Apollo was a scramble to get the absolute minimum tin can to the moon as fast as possible which wouldn't kill the 2-3 men inside it. Building anything secure is a detail-oriented endeavour. It is not solvable with a moonshot.

The question I have for cisco is: why are these special features for resisting cyberattack not standard on EVERY router?

peblos2• 3 years ago

“Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions.”

Probably not something most Cisco customers need or want

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

That’s the right question about Cisco you should be asking.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

The absolute minimum tin that delivered three people to the moon and return them safely to Earth could have been destroyed by a fault in almost any of its innumerable subsystems and components. It was very much a detail-oriented endeavor and set the standard for unit and integration testing for decades, maybe even up through the present.

thedaly2• 3 years ago

In regards to this specific case, because it is expensive and unnecessary.

Cisco’s response involved shipping a large order of modified equipment, specifically designed to maintain accurate time even under radio jamming conditions. This solution employs the Cisco Industrial Ethernet switch with an internal crystal oscillator, enabling new clock recovery algorithms for accurate timekeeping when GPS is unavailable.

These modified versions of the Cisco Industrial Ethernet 5000 series switches, tested and stress-tested in Cisco’s Austin, Texas lab, were sent to Ukrenergo. The project, which cost around $1 million, was supported by the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Department of Commerce in terms of logistics and coordination. Cisco provided the equipment free of charge.

marcus0x626• 3 years ago

So you want to pay for a high accuracy local time source in every single Ethernet switch and router and wireless controller…in case the Russians disrupt GPS over one of your locations?

Most Cisco customers:

1) Do not directly use a GPS time clock in their network. They use an NTP-based source that is ultimately timed by someone else’s GPS clock.

2) Do not want to pay for extra hardware they will not use

3) Do not need their network equipment certified to -34C, or want to pay for a device that would work in such conditions.

twelve403• 3 years ago

resisting cyberattack

What cyberattack uses GPS jamming? This is just dumb journos trying to spice up the article. The Register's article says this is a side effect from trying to jam missile guidance systems. Probably by their own EW systems while defending from a missile or a shahed strike.

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

I’ve yet to see “AI-assisted” attack techniques that are outside of the typical social engineering generation, can you give any examples of AI actually developing novel techniques for zero days or being used for that?

fgoesbrrr• 3 years ago

It's about scale and speed, not novel attacks.

Also exploitation. An AI could determine much faster what might be worth stealing reducing mitigation time.

mensetmanusman2• 3 years ago

Soon, your entire org will be turing tested weekly over text, audio, and video, and one mistake will result in access to your network.

Logans_Run• 3 years ago

The trouble is that it has always been a case of "Backdoors for me but not for thee" rather than backdoor free.

And as for the price - I was surprised at the cost stated when even a quick search turned up various RTC modules for as low as 0.50p/$0.50 per module which I'm sure could be obtained (in bulk) for a lot less.

Ah well, I guess I just don't understand big business and geo-politics.

stephen_g• 3 years ago

RTCs are only in the tens to hundreds of millions of parts per million accuracy per day, they’re talking crystals so we’re probably talking parts like OCXOs with three or four or more orders of magnitude better accuracy/stability (even down to less than 1ppb per day).

Still these parts are only around one hundred to a couple of hundred dollars per unit, depending on specs, but the bulk of the cost was likely the NRE of hardware design (you actually need to interface these things in, which means board design etc.) and all the software development.

In relatively small quantity electronics, BOM cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of anything.

andrewmutz• 3 years ago

If there was funding available to build secure systems, do we know how to do it? If we rebuilt everything from scratch today, what would we do differently?

fbdab1032• 3 years ago

At minimum, we should have open source hardware/software for network infrastructure. None of this closed source Cisco gear where they keep leaving embedded root passwords. I would love to see a proven sel4 microkernel used for more network appliances. C/C++ seem like obvious mistakes at this point given the industry's inability to write secure code. Rust/Ada or any GC language would be appropriate.

er4hn• 3 years ago

That is a goal of the government. EO 14028 makes the biden administration the first to take cybersecurity seriously. The problems are two fold:

- An attacker only has to get lucky once. You have to do the right thing everytime.

and

- It's not clear you didn't do the right thing until it's too late.

It's possible to a much better job of cybersec than we're doing today, but everything today is such a hodgepodge of "It works, it barely works, onto the next thing" that it's hard to do so. Developers can barely be expected to write documentation, getting people to routinely do static and dynamic analysis on their code is going to be a high bar to get over.

Kalium2• 3 years ago

It's a good idea! I like where your head is at.

Apollo and other historic moonshot programs were fundamentally striving to match some set of fixed natural forces with human ingenuity. The conditions to be met and overcome were measurable and knowable. They were natural-world challenges, bristling with natural-world problems. Vacuum, radiation, lunar regolith. The sound barrier, the Polio virus, and more.

Unfortunately, this is in sharp contrast to the challenges of security. Information security is an adversarial, human-centered enterprise. The forces with which we contend, armed with human ingenuity, are themselves armed with the same. It becomes a question of resources and economics. Even the cryptography on which so much relies is ultimately a question of how much breaking it is worth. If we are willing to spend enough, we can probably make it too expensive to successfully attack a system.

Plus, we know that the weakest leak in any system is generally the humans involved.

With all this in mind, we cannot possibly expect to build systems with zero vulnerabilities. It's not a moonshotable goal. What we can do - and what a mature security program will help you do - is plan for detecting, containing, mitigating, and recovering from attacks.

Veserv6• 3 years ago

Those are the talking points of the people who got us into this mess who have been systemically incapable of deploying or even developing secure systems. There is no absolutely reason to listen to the liars who have repeatedly promised secure systems while being utterly incapable of doing so for literal decades. The task is not impossible, the commercial vendors like Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. are just incompetent at security and are trying to poison the well by claiming that it is impossible just because they can not do it.

If you want to know what actual high security development looks like you can just look to Orange Book Level A1 certified systems and Common Criteria EAL 6/7 certified systems. Systems designed for high security with formal specifications, robust documentation, exhaustive testing, thorough review, spotless penetration testing by well-funded intelligence agencies, formal proofs of correctness, and proven deployment in high criticality settings. The Common Criteria SKPP literally required the NSA to fail a multi-month penetration test while having the full source code, internal documentation, and formal specification.

These commercial vendors believe protecting against state actors is literally impossible even though it has already been demonstrated in front of their faces for decades. Nothing they say about security is useful because they know nothing about what is needed to make systems that are actually secure.

3np• 3 years ago

Re-report of https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/22/cisco_modded_switch_u...

twelve403• 3 years ago

thanks, didn't notice that link at the bottom, this article seemed much more coherent. All the hacking FUD aside (sitting here trying to figure out how or why would malware perform GPS jamming?), this seems to be the root cause:

jamming activity is primarily carried out to interfere with missile guidance systems, but a knock-on effect is disruption to grid operators

instagib2• 3 years ago

So they put a rubidium oscillator in the Cisco boxes or upgraded their current equipment line.

slide 15 has other solutions to gps denial. https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2016/silverstein.pdf

IEEE 1588-2008 is a good solution at 10 updates per second.

secondary_op• 3 years ago

Let's hear about offence Cisco puts out against US enemy states, or even against subordinate states just in case.

hulitu• 3 years ago

Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks

So they changed the password for the backdoor [1]. /s

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-a...

Cisco aids Ukraine defense with modified switches to counter Russian attacks

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