Short paper: A dangerous 'Pyrotechnic Composition': Fireworks, embedded wireless and insecurity-by-design

Costin, Andrei; Francillon, Aurélien
WISEC 2014, 7th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, 23-25 July 2014, Oxford, United Kingdom

Fireworks are used around the world to salute popular events such as festivals, weddings, and public or private celebrations. Besides their entertaining effects fireworks are essentially colored explosives which are sometimes directly used as weapons. Modern fireworks systems heavily rely on `wireless pyrotechnic firing systems'. Those `embedded cyber-physical systems' (ECPS) are able to remotely control pyrotechnic composition ignition. The failure to properly secure these computer sub-systems may have disastrous, if not deadly, consequences. They rely on standardized wireless communications, off the shelf embedded hardware and custom firmware.

In this short paper, we describe our experience in discovering and exploiting a wireless firing system in a short amount of time without any prior knowledge of such systems. In summary, we demonstrate our methodology starting from analysis of firmware, the discovery of vulnerabilities and finally by demonstrating a real world attack. Finally, we stress that the security of pyrotechnic firing systems should be considered seriously, which could be achieved through improved safety compliance requirements and control.


DOI
Type:
Conférence
City:
Oxford
Date:
2014-07-23
Department:
Sécurité numérique
Eurecom Ref:
4324
Copyright:
© ACM, 2014. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in WISEC 2014, 7th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, 23-25 July 2014, Oxford, United Kingdom http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2627393.2627401

PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/4324