Just how completely technology has been incorporated into our world was driven home to me recently when a pothole broke the valve stem on one of my car’s tires, resulting in a warning on my dash and a flat tire. My regular mechanic was able to replace the stem, but I had to take the car to another shop to have it programmed.
My car is not a smartcar. It was not even state-of-the-art when it was new several years ago. I didn’t opt for electric locks or power seats. But still the tires have electronic components communicating over an in-car network.
I’m not sure that this represents a real risk or that my tires are a practical vector for cyberthreats, but it illustrates the growing complexity of the physical systems we rely on daily and the fact that the boundary between the real world and cyberspace has become very blurred. And as we know, cyberspace is a dangerous place.
A week after the Government Accountability released a report on cybersecurity in our cars, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a new draft of guidance for engineering security into physical systems. As I wrote in last week’s Cybereye, rapid advances in smartcar technology are outpacing our ability to secure them and our vehicles are becoming more vulnerable to cyberattacks. NIST’s draft Special Publication 800-160 offers a systems-oriented approach for engineering trustworthy secure systems—not just in smartcars, but in everything.
“Engineering-based approaches to solutions are essential to managing the growing complexity, dynamicity, and interconnectedness of today’s systems—as exemplified by cyber-physical systems and systems-of-systems,” wrote NIST computer scientist Ron Ross, an author of the publication. “Even the notion of the Internet of Things, at its core, is a term that characterizes a type of system.”
This is the second draft of SP 800-160 and it represents a comprehensive update of the initial draft, published two years ago. It reflects the growing interconnection between electronic and physical systems, the increasing frequency and intensity of cyberattacks and risks associated with them. “We are bringing the cyber and physical worlds fully together” in this draft, Ross said.
NIST does not break new ground in this document. It applies security principles already defined in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, a standard for systems security engineering, and provides systems security engineering techniques for developers. The idea is to start the engineering process with both the functional and security requirements of stakeholders, and ensure that these requirements are addressed throughout.
“Increasing the trustworthiness of systems is a significant undertaking that requires a substantial investment in the requirements, architecture, design, and development of systems, components, applications, and networks,” the publication says. This requires a fundamental change to the current “business as usual” culture.
Many technology companies already are working to achieve trustworthy computing. With the real world and cyberspace becoming indistinguishable, we need to work toward trustworthy everything.
Comments on the second draft of SP 800-160 can be sent to sec-cert@nist.gov until July 1.