Table 5: Initial experimentation results.
No. Time Source Destination Protocol Length Info
80040 19:58:32.5 192.168.1.12 192.168.1.5 BACnet 85 Confirmed-REQ confirmedCOVNotification[ 67]
device,9999 analog-output,1 present-value
80041 19:58:32.5 192.168.1.5 192.168.1.12 BACnet 60 Reject unrecognized-service[ 67]
80327 19:58:48.4 192.168.1.12 192.168.1.5 BACnet 85 Confirmed-REQ confirmedCOVNotification[ 69]
device,9999 analog-output,1 present-value
80510 19:58:58.4 192.168.1.12 192.168.1.5 BACnet 85 Confirmed-REQ confirmedCOVNotification[ 69]
device,9999 analog-output,1 present-value
80656 19:59:08.4 192.168.1.12 192.168.1.5 BACnet 85 Confirmed-REQ confirmedCOVNotification[ 69]
device,9999 analog-output,1 present-value
81438 19:59:48.5 192.168.1.12 192.168.1.5 BACnet 85 Confirmed-REQ confirmedCOVNotification[ 70]
device,9999 analog-output,1 present-value
81439 19:59:48.5 192.168.1.5 192.168.1.12 BACnet 60 Reject unrecognized-service[ 70]
scriptions and source authentication means that there
is the potential to have this duration value increased
by a malicious host.
7 CONCLUSION
This paper described a proof-of-concept attack on any
building automation system that uses the BACnet pro-
tocol change of value reporting function as part of
their communication and control, and suggested that
a formal proof of the attack would be valuable. We
found that while BACnet has a security addendum
to the standard which defines source authentication,
this is not implemented in practice. We deployed an
experimental setup to investigate the phenomena de-
rived from the BACnet standard, with initial results
promising. We defined a situation where multiple
subscriptions and a lack of source authentication can
cause a failure of critical infrastructure, leading to a
more serious second-order effect, using banking sys-
tems as an example.
In future work, we intend to expand on our exper-
imental testbed, to incorporate more subscribed de-
vices, and widen the scope to other services. Further
experiments will be undertaken, to test the array relin-
quish issue to determine what actually happens given
network traces and memory allocation to the device.
The CoV experiments will be expanded, with inves-
tigation into the use of different stack implementa-
tions, to verify if the behaviour can be generalised.
Finally, we will explore modeling of the protocol to
derive identification patterns, along with defining an
adversary model for building automation.
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