Network Reconnaissance and Vulnerability Excavation of Secure DDS Systems
This addresses a critical security vulnerability in Industrial IoT systems (e.g., automotive, defense) by exposing a flaw in a widely used protocol, though it is incremental as it builds on known issues in the standard.
The paper tackled the confidentiality breach in Secure DDS v1.1, where capability lists are leaked during handshake, enabling attackers to use network reconnaissance and formal verification to reason about topology and launch targeted attacks like denial of service.
Distribution Service (DDS) is a realtime peer-to-peer protocol that serves as a scalable middleware between distributed networked systems found in many Industrial IoT domains such as automotive, medical, energy, and defense. Since the initial ratification of the standard, specifications have introduced a Security Model and Service Plugin Interface (SPI) architecture, facilitating authenticated encryption and data centric access control while preserving interoperable data exchange. However, as Secure DDS v1.1, the default plugin specifications presently exchanges digitally signed capability lists of both participants in the clear during the crypto handshake for permission attestation; thus breaching confidentiality of the context of the connection. In this work, we present an attacker model that makes use of network reconnaissance afforded by this leaked context in conjunction with formal verification and model checking to arbitrarily reason about the underlying topology and reachability of information flow, enabling targeted attacks such as selective denial of service, adversarial partitioning of the data bus, or vulnerability excavation of vendor implementations.