The Physics of Sensor Cybersecurity
Kevin Fu

Medical devices, autonomous vehicles, and the Internet of Things depend on the integrity and availability of trustworthy data from sensors to make safety-critical, automated decisions. How can such cyber-physical systems remain secure against adversary using intentional interference to fool sensors? Building upon classic research in cryptographic fault injection and side channels, research in analog cybersecurity explores how to protect digital computer systems from physics-based attacks. Analog cybersecurity risks can bubble up into operating systems as bizarre, undefined behavior. For instance, transduction attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the physics of a sensor to manipulate its output. Transduction attacks using audible acoustics, ultrasonic or radio interference can inject chosen signals into sensors found in devices ranging from Fitbits to implantable medical devices to smartphones, drones and CubeSats.

Defenders can fight back with physics, more trustworthy software APIs and a shift in thinking toward system engineering. Fu will explain how to respect von Neumann’s 1956 admonition to design reliable organisms from unreliable components in the context of embedded security. He will also discuss the need for science and engineering national leadership by faculty in Washington on strategic matters of cybersecurity R&D and education.

Oligo-Snoop: A Non-Invasive Side Channel Attack Against DNA Synthesis Machines
Sina Faezi on behalf of Mohammad Al Faruque

Synthetic biology is developing into a promising science and engineering field. One of the enabling technologies for this field is the DNA synthesizer. It allows researchers to custom-build sequences of oligonucleotides (short DNA strands) using the nucleobases: Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), and Thymine (T). Incorporating these sequences into organisms can result in improved disease resistance and lifespan for plants, animals, and humans. Hence, many laboratories spend large amounts of capital researching and developing unique sequences of oligonucleotides. However, these DNA synthesizers are fully automated systems with cyber-domain processes and physical domain components. Hence, they may be prone to security breaches like any other computing system. In our work, we present a novel acoustic side-channel attack methodology which can be used on DNA synthesizers to breach their confidentiality and steal valuable oligonucleotide sequences.

Our proposed attack methodology achieves an average accuracy of 88.07 % in predicting each base and is able to reconstruct short sequences with 100 % accuracy by making less than 21 guesses out of 415 possibilities. We evaluate our attack against the effects of the microphone’s distance from the DNA synthesizer and show that our attack methodology can achieve over 80 % accuracy when the microphone is placed as far as 0.7 meters from the DNA synthesizer despite the presence of common room noise. In addition, we reconstruct DNA sequences to show how effectively an attacker with biomedical-domain knowledge would be able to derive the intended functionality of the sequence using the proposed attack methodology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first methodology that highlights the possibility of such an attack on systems used to synthesize DNA molecules.