A Security Evaluation of a Platform Intended for Critical Infrastructure - A Case Study for Sinusoidal Systems

Sammanfattning

The Digital Measurement Platform (DMP) is a safety-critical system designed fordigital substations. It uses software applications to replicate the functionality oftraditional physical power meters by processing data directly from the IEC61850process bus. This allows multiple virtual meters to operate efficiently on a singlehardware unit. While the operational feasibility and precision of the DMP havebeen carefully tested, its cybersecurity resilience remains unexplored. Given itsdeployment in critical infrastructure, this lack of security analysis is a significantgap.This thesis addresses that gap by performing a purple-team security assessment of theDMP. Through threat modeling, baseline security evaluation, and controlled attackexperiments, we evaluate the resilience of the platform against an attacker controllingcode inside an unprivileged container. We find that the DMP demonstrates resilienceagainst container escapes, SQL injection, and Confused Deputy attacks. However,several Denial of Service vulnerabilities were successfully exploited. Flooding sharedbind mounts and stdout/stderr bypasses cgroup resource limits to exhaust the hoststorage, while architectural weaknesses in the framework’s message handling enableOOM crashes within seconds. Mitigations are proposed for all successful exploits.