Markus Heinrich

Christian Schlehuber, Markus Heinrich, Tsvetoslava Vateva-Gurova et al.

We present the proposed security architecture Deutsche Bahn plans to deploy to protect its trackside safety-critical signalling system against cyber-attacks. We first present the existing reference interlocking system that is built using standard components. Next, we present a taxonomy to help model the attack vectors relevant for the railway environment. Building upon this, we present the proposed "compartmentalized" defence concept for securing the upcoming signalling systems.

Markus Heinrich, Arwed Gölz, Tolga Arul et al.

We propose a rule-based anomaly detection system for railway signalling that mitigates attacks by a Dolev-Yao attacker who is able to inject control commands and to perform semantic attacks. The system as well mitigates the effects of a compromised signal box that an attacker uses to issue licit but mistimed control messages. We consider an attacker that could cause train derailments and collisions, if our countermeasure is not employed. We apply safety principles of railway operation to a distributed anomaly detection system that inspects incoming commands on the signals and points. The proposed anomaly detection system detects all attacks of our model without producing false positives, while it requires only a small amount of overhead in terms of network communication and latency compared to normal train operation.