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eFuzz: A Fuzzer for DLMS/COSEM Electricity Meters

Published: 07 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Smart grids enable new functionalities like remote and micro management and consequently, provide increased efficiency, easy management and effectiveness of the entire power grid infrastructure. In order to achieve this, smart meters are attached to the communication network, collecting fine granular data. Unfortunately, as the smart meters are limited devices connected to the network and running software, they also make the whole smart grid more vulnerable than the traditional grids in term of software problems and even possible cyber attacks. In this paper, we work towards an increased software security of smart metering devices and propose a fuzzing framework, eFuzz, built on the generic fuzzing framework Peach to detect software problems. eFuzz tests smart metering devices based on the communication protocol DLMS/COSEM, the standard protocol used in Europe, for possible faults. Our experiments prove the effectiveness of using an automated fuzzing framework compared to resource demanding, human made software protocol inspections. As an example, eFuzz detected between 10 and 40 bugs in different configurations in less than 3 hours while a manual inspection takes weeks. We also investigate the quality of the eFuzz results by comparing with the traditional non-automated evaluation of the same device with respect to scope and efficiency. Our analysis shows that eFuzz is a powerful tool for security inspections for smart meters, and embedded systems in general.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Fuzzing for Power Grids: A Comparative Study of Existing Frameworks and a New Method for Detecting Silent Crashes in Control Devices2023 IEEE Design Methodologies Conference (DMC)10.1109/DMC58182.2023.10412473(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Fuzzing Framework for IEC 60870-5-104 ProtocolProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering10.1145/3569966.3570026(190-194)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2022
  • (2019)Automated Fuzzing of Automotive Control Units2019 International Workshop on Secure Internet of Things (SIOT)10.1109/SIOT48044.2019.9637090(1-8)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
SEGS '14: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Smart Energy Grid Security
November 2014
60 pages
ISBN:9781450331548
DOI:10.1145/2667190
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 November 2014

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Author Tags

  1. automated testing
  2. fuzz testing
  3. software vulnerabilities

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CCS'14
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SEGS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 11 submissions, 64%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 19 of 38 submissions, 50%

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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
October 14 - 18, 2024
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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Fuzzing for Power Grids: A Comparative Study of Existing Frameworks and a New Method for Detecting Silent Crashes in Control Devices2023 IEEE Design Methodologies Conference (DMC)10.1109/DMC58182.2023.10412473(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Fuzzing Framework for IEC 60870-5-104 ProtocolProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering10.1145/3569966.3570026(190-194)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2022
  • (2019)Automated Fuzzing of Automotive Control Units2019 International Workshop on Secure Internet of Things (SIOT)10.1109/SIOT48044.2019.9637090(1-8)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2019
  • (2019)Finding Sands in the Eyes: Vulnerabilities Discovery in IoT With EUFuzzer on Human Machine InterfaceIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29310617(103751-103759)Online publication date: 2019
  • (2015)Private data aggregation with groups for smart grids in a dynamic setting using CRT2015 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)10.1109/WIFS.2015.7368584(1-6)Online publication date: Nov-2015

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