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Microcontrollers and integrated circuits in general have become ubiquitous in the world today. All aspects of our lives depend on them from driving to work, to calling our friends, to checking our bank account balance. People who would do harm to individuals, corporations and nation states are aware of this and for that reason they seek to find or create and exploit vulnerabilities in integrated circuits. This dissertation contains three papers dealing with these types of vulnerabilities. The first paper talks about a vulnerability that was found on a microcontroller, which is a type of integrated circuit. The final two papers deal with hardware trojans. Hardware trojans are purposely added to the design of an integrated circuit in secret so that the manufacturer doesn’t know about it. They are used to damage the integrated circuit, leak confidential information, or in other ways alter the circuit. Hardware trojans are a major concern for anyone using integrated circuits because an attacker can alter a circuit in almost any way if they are successful in inserting one. A known method to prevent hardware trojan insertion is discussed and a type of circuit for which this method does not work is revealed. The discussion of hardware trojans is concluded with a new way to detect them before the integrated circuit is manufactured. Modern deep learning models are used to detect the portions of the hardware trojan called triggers that activate them.

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<p>A closed-source ICS communication is a fundamental component of supervisory software and PLCs operating critical infrastructure or configuring devices. As this is a vital communication, a compromised protocol can allow attackers to take over the entire critical infrastructure network and maliciously manipulate field device values. Thus, it is crucial to conduct security assessments of these closed-source protocol communications before deploy?ing them in a production environment to ensure the safety of critical infrastructure. However, Fuzzing closed-source communication without understanding the protocol structure or state is ineffective, making testing such closed-source communications a challenging task. </p> <p><br></p> <p>This research study introduces the APEX-ICS framework, which consists of two significant components: Automatic closed-source ICS protocol reverse-engineering and stateful black-box fuzzing. The former aims to reverse-engineer the protocol communication, which is critical to effectively performing the fuzzing technique. The latter component leverages the generated grammar to detect vulnerabilities in communication between supervisory software and PLCs. The framework prototype was implemented using the Codesys v3.0 closed-source protocol communication to conduct reverse engineering and fuzzing and successfully identified 4 previously unknown vulnerabilities, which were found to impact more than 400 manufacturer’s devices. </p>

<p> A closed-source ICS communication is a fundamental component of supervisory software and PLCs operating critical infrastructure or configuring devices. As this is a vital communication, a compromised protocol can allow attackers to take over the entire critical infrastructure network and maliciously manipulate field device values. Thus, it is crucial to conduct security assessments of these closed-source protocol communications before deploying them in a production environment to ensure the safety of critical infrastructure. However, Fuzzing closed-source communication without understanding the protocol structure or state is ineffective, making testing such closed-source communications a challenging task.</p> <p><br> This research study introduces the APEX-ICS framework, which consists of two significant components: Automatic closed-source ICS protocol reverse-engineering and stateful black-box fuzzing. The former aims to reverse-engineer the protocol communication, which is critical to effectively performing the fuzzing technique. The latter component leverages the generated grammar to detect vulnerabilities in communication between supervisory software and PLCs. The framework prototype was implemented using the Codesys v3.0 closed-source protocol communication to conduct reverse engineering and fuzzing and successfully identified 4 previously unknown vulnerabilities, which were found to impact more than 400 manufacturer’s devices. </p>