Tag: W11 – Crashing and Hacking the Smart City

Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Anthony Townsend

– In the case of a blackout or crisis (like the 2007 Washington Metro rail fire, pp. 255) caused by buggy software, how can we ensure that a failsafe is in place without further burdening the system? Is a manual switch too inefficient? How long should previous models be kept in dormant, but functioning order incase the current system fails? How is the economic toll of a shutdown calculated?

– “Today, netizens everywhere believe that the Internet began as a military effort to design a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.” (pp. 259) Especially in the US, where the budget for military and defense is so immense, it seems as though many huge technical leaps were derived from military research and efforts. It would be interesting to know what percentage this is, or a list of modern tech that was developed as a martial consequent.

– “…power outages and power quality disturbances cost the US economy between $80 billion and $188 billion a year.” (pp. 264) Again, how is this calculated? By simple ‘time is money’ reasoning, or does it also account for the cost of repairs, etc.?

– ” It’s one thing for your e-mail to go down for a few hours, but it’s another thing when everyone in your neighborhood gets locked out of their homes.” (pp. 265) If a buggy or brittle software means people might get locked out of their homes, it also stands to reason that people could be accidentally locked in or that the software could be hacked. Would this inspire a new system of robberies, where the thieves can simply unlock your door remotely and stroll into your residence? Even more threatening than a home robbery, what happens when government or large infrastructural networks are hacked maliciously?

– “In November 2010, without public objection, the city of Chongqing launched an effort…to install some five hundred thousand video cameras…” (pp. 273) Was the public really asked in the first place, and if so, was there really even a realistic option for objection?

– As Townsend asks in the last paragraph, could we have predicted the consequences of sprawl and new technologies? Just as importantly, would it have mattered if we did? Would the public have believed these possibilities, and would they have cared? Would the technology of the time have allowed us to avoid these consequences by going about motorization in a different way?

 

An Emerging US (and World) Threat – Cesar Cerrudo

– In contrast to Townsend, who states several times that a buggy, brittle smart city is “unimaginable,” Cerrudo seems to have thought about and imagined just that in great detail. What exactly, is his target audience? I’d imagine everyone, but is his goal for the public, the private sector, or municipalities to read this paper and take the listed risks seriously? Is he worried that once they know the risks, they still won’t be taken seriously? Especially with the state of the world now, I do not think these threats are at all hard to imagine.

– Cerrudo offers a brief list of recommendations for the reduction of hacking problems. If it is not already happening, what can be done to make sure that a city introducing ‘smart’ initiatives is robust and protected as a priority from the outset? Are there already examples of this?

– In terms of smart waste management and smell sensors which may not be seen as a priority, is there a risk of the public becoming more and more aggravated knowing that a sensor is picking up the disturbance but nothing is happening? (As seen in the FixMyStreet issues brought up in the Gabrys reading.)

If as Cerrudo afirms “The more technology a city uses, the more vulnerable to cyber attacks it is […] it’s only a matter of time until attacks on city services and infrastructure happen”, how we could thing of infrastructure that is tecnological, but not in the traditional sense, or at least not so dependant on digital information? Could a system that takes resilience as a value could be deveolped? and even if there is some loss in term of efficiency could strategies as redundancy be implemented in the building of the infrastructure of the smart city?

Townsend affirms that “The sheer of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structure humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportuities for bugs and unanticipated interactions”. In this context, could we argue that the problem is not just a matter of improving the design of the systems, but in any case, to have back-up systems that are more granular, less centralized, and less dependant on digital technologies?

In the same manner, all this scenarios, at the end, show the need of having smart citizens that have the skills necessary to undestand and deal with the problems that will come with the deployment of a smart cities. Should a plan to ‘smarten’ the citizen be integral part of the development of smart cities?

 

 

 

“Buggy, Brittle and Bugged,” Smart Cities

• “Today, we routinely send anonymous bug reports to software companies when our desktop crashes.” If this is a portable model to debug smart cities in the future, will smart citizens be prepared? Although we report these bugs, it is maybe too late because the bugs may have already lead to a crashing of the system. In this situation, should we rethink a new way to build a smart city? It may not be top- bottom or bottom- top that simple. Maybe we could start to build smart citizens first?

• As the book mentioned, in the parts of the world, different countries face the same issue – surveillance, but they have different feedbacks. It brings the idea- situated smart cities. When smart cities are crashing, and every smart cities are different. Should we make all back-up ways all the same or we must situate back-up ways for specific smart cities in the world when smart cities face the same bug?

An Emerging US (and World) Threat

• The author mentioned “Cyber Security Problems” and also gave “Recommendations” for basic problems of smart cities. Maybe there will be disastrous If we change all cities in this world to be smart cities one day, would we have the possibility to change them back to current? When we think about how to back up our technology masterpiece – the smart cities, should we think throughout for years how could we make a smart city(test bed) without bugs before we make the second one or we could predict and solve these bugs at least?

Interdependence and Overreliance

 

1)  “ We are weaving technologies into our homes, our communities, even our bodies- but even experts have become disturbingly complacent about their shortcomings. The rest of us rarely question them at all…. But what if it’s the harbinger of bigger problems? What is the seed of smart cities own destruction are already built into their DNA? –Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Smart Cities. Anthony Townsend

“In our research at IOActive Labs, we constantly find very vulnerable technology being used across different industries. This same technology also is used for critical infrastructure without any security testing. Although cities usually rigorously test devices and systems for functionality, resistance to weather conditions, and so on, there is often little or no cyber security testing at all, which is concerning to say the least.”

“When either wireless or wired communications security is poor, an attacker can easily intercept and hijack communications and take control of devices and networks. We see this all the time; most such communications are insecure”. –  Active Hacking – Cesar Cerrudo

 

If smart cities contain bugs within their systems, before these systems are plugged into cities, how do you find the bug or error without plugging it into a city? How can they be tested before they are integrated into a network that effects not just the infrastructure but people as well? Is the system or method of testing prone to flaws as well? Aren’t security systems set up to prevent cyber hacking prone to hacking as well? They may defend the network better but they are also susceptible to attacks and are vulnerable too. How effective are cyber security systems? There are new virus developed everyday, how effective are cyber security softwares and systems? What are their limitations and parameters?

 

2) “The sheer size of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structures humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportunities for bugs and unanticipated interactions.”

“ The pervasiveness of bugs in smart cities is disconcerting. We don’t have a clear grasp of where the biggest risks lie, when and how they will cause systems to fail, or what the chain reaction consequences will be. Who is responsible when a smart city crashes? And how will citizens help debug the city?”

–Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Smart Cities. Anthony Townsend

“There is a huge and unknown attack surface on smarter cities. With so much complexity and interdependency, it is difficult to know what and how everything is exposed. Therefore, simple problems could cause a big impact due to interdependency and chain reactions.20 This is what makes threat modeling so important…Has anyone seen a threat model for a city? Maybe these exist, but I haven’t seen one. Some larger software and services vendors have issued general documents about cyber security in cities but nothing very specific.”

 

“The current attack surface for cities is huge and wide open to attack. This is a real and immediate danger. The more technology a city uses, the more vulnerable to cyber attacks it is, so the smartest cities have the highest risks.”

 

–  Active Hacking – Cesar Cerrudo

City smart systems consist of the physical infrastructure and a digital one, both come with their own set of complications and problems, What approach can lead to this integration, to be less riskier and better fitting? How would one test this integration? Does it depend on the context or the issue, whether a bottom up or top down approach is effective, it also depends on which infrastructure is effected? What type of prototype or model should be built or an actual neighborhood would be taken as a prototype to test such technologies first? Can these systems, which are interdependent on each other, function better if when one is effected it shuts down so as not to effect other systems and back up system takes its place? (parallel circuit and not a series circuit). The malfunction of one network would replace itself with a back up system to prevent the other systems dependent on it to not malfunction. System such as the internet, cloud computing, cellular networks, GPS, sensors, etc. How can these chain reactions be addressed and what countermeasures need to be made or taken in order to prevent a complete system shutdown or malfunction?

 

3) “ In our rush to build smart cities on a foundation of technologies for sensing and control of the world around us, should we be at all surprised when they are turned around to control us?’

“ Thinking about the unthinkable dictated a whole new approach to building cities. By concentrating population, infrastructure, and industrial capacity in nice, big juicy, megaton sized targets they had become a liability in the nuclear age.” …Norbert Weiner, “The decentralization of our cities on the spots on which they stand, plus the release of our whole communications system from the threat of a disastrous tie-up, are reforms which are long overdue… For a city is primarily a communications center serving the same purpose as a nerve center in the body.”

“We will never know if the negative impacts could have been avoided, but it would not have cost much to try. We might have even avoided the very unintended consequences we now invent smart technologies.”

–Buggy, Brittle and Bugged – Smart Cities. Anthony Townsend

 

“It’s extremely important: Technologies used by cities must be properly security audited to make certain that they are secure before they are implemented. …. When we see that the data that feeds smart city systems is blindly trusted and can be easily manipulated, that the systems can be easily hacked, and there are security problems everywhere, that is when smart cities become Dumb Cities.”

“The nature of the impact depends on the extent to which a city relies on the services affected.”

–  Active Hacking – Cesar Cerrudo

 

By overseeing and managing the data being fed into and out of smart city systems, how effective would this solution of managing the data be when it comes to the structure of the system? If the system itself has bugs then does the data processing through it matter? To what extent?

If these consequences, (Townsend mentions) were addressed, would they only effect the problem in the short run or the long run? Is the patch, for solving the issue to let the system continue working rather than actually finding the core root of the problem?

Does the weakness or problems in the smart city infrastructure lead to it being called dumb city or does the existence of dumb citizens (participatory) lead to it being called a dumb city? Or the existence of both define the existence of dumb cities? What effects smart cities more, currently: citizens that effect the infrastructure of the city or do the networks or systems integrated in these cities. Can citizens take security into their own hands? How so ? Or do we need specialized companies like IOactive labs to secure our systems? How involved do citizens need to be when addressing such problems?

 

 

 

 

 

Cerrudo, “An Emerging US (and World) Threat: Cities Wide Open to Cyber Attacks,” White Paper

-Sadly cities are implementing new technologies without first testing cyber security, there is often little or no cyber security testing at all, vendors with little or no experience in implementing security features, Many vendors implement custom wireless and wired communication protocols with either very poor security or no security…. Who is responsible or at fault for such lack of knowledge or being carless while implementing technologies in smart city, the government, other private organizations or vendors who designs these devices and technology?

– In our research at IOActive Labs, we constantly find very vulnerable technology being used across different industries. This same technology also is used for critical infrastructure without any security testing. Although cities usually rigorously test devices and systems for functionality, resistance to weather conditions, and so on, there is often little or no cyber security testing at all, which is concerning to say the least (pg.no: 08). Is it always possible to test technology completely and assure that there is no bug? Sometimes a hardware failure can also cause system to fail.

Townsend, “Buggy, Brittle and Bugged,” Smart Cities

-The sheer size of city-scale smart systems comes with its own set of problems. Cities and their infrastructure are already the most complex structure humankind has ever created. Interweaving them with equally complex information processing can only multiply the opportunity for bugs an unanticipated interactions (pg.no:256). Will the bottom up process of building smart cities have minimal chances for bugs and unanticipated interactions?