CYBERSECURITY |
Right: The
intersection
between LA’s
Ventura Freeway
and Glendale
Freeway, where
a cyberattack on
traffic signals
caused gridlock
in 2006
The attack should have been a wake-up call to
traffic managers everywhere to beef up security
in traffic management centres and to address
security flaws in signal infrastructure. But
research undertaken by the University of
Michigan in 2014 by Professor Alex Halderman
shone a light on a “systemic lack of security
consciousness” amongst transportation
departments” running “future
embedded systems”.
In a paper entitled,
Green Lights Forever:
Analyzing the Security of
Traffic Infrastructure, with
the permission of
a Michigan Road agency,
Halderman and his
team investigated how
susceptible a networked
traffic light system, using
wireless technology, was
to cyber attack.
“Due to systemic failures
by the designers”, they
discovered that was it was not only
possible to “gain control of a system of
almost 100 intersections” but to also “change
the lights on command”.
Kevin Curran, professor of cybersecurity at
Ulster University, in Northern Ireland, says that
traffic light control systems based on wireless
communication technologies, are particularly
susceptible to attack.
“In the United States where these systems are
becoming increasingly popular, cyber attackers
demonstrated how easily it was to infiltrate this
technology largely because of a lack of ‘cyber
hygiene’. Often engineers were using default
passwords leaving the IP address free for
hackers to access.”
Creating robust systems
The key to designing signal control that is
resilient to attack lies in overall system
architecture. Centralized control centers may
seem, to the layman, like vulnerable points for
attack, but they aren’t necessarily more
vulnerable than having each junction isolated
and controlled independently, so long as they
are designed correctly.
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Dr Zhengguo Sheng, advanced networks and communications, University of Sussex, UK
080 Intertraffic World | Annual Showcase 2020
100 The number of vulnerable
intersections a 2014
academic paper identified
in Michigan, USA
“It’s not a case of pitting one against
another, but a secure system architecture that
counts,” says Dr Zhengguo Sheng, a lecturer in
advanced networks and communications at the
University of Sussex, UK. “Although most
modern traffic management systems are
centralized, they are not based in one single
location, but in a few strategic centres. All use
a multi-layered control system with a back-up
system that runs in tandem with the operating
system. Therefore, if a hacker does exploit
a vulnerability in the system, it is fairly easy to
get it up and running again.”
But, according to Dr Sheng, just because the
majority of traffic authorities “are using the
correct system architecture, it doesn’t mean
that they are safe from cyberattack”.