How Hardware Infrastructure Can Be Vulnerable to Hacking

This Wired article ‘How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator‘ exposes at length the Aurora experiment in 2007 – how a small file was able to destroy a large diesel generator hardware, demonstrating the vulnerability of hardware to hacking (also in Wikipedia ‘Aurora Generator Test‘). This shows that well thought hacking can be targeted to destroy fully non-digital hardware. What about our vulnerability now that IoT is widespread and most hardware also host a large amount of software?

I find this article worth reading because it shows that hardware destruction was carried out indirectly, analyzing ways of making it dysfunction. It requires a lot of analysis and is not straightforward, but remains impressive as it shows that is could be relatively easy to disrupt heavily the infrastructures we have come to rely on.

It demonstrates that with the right focus and willingness, hacking can have a substantial impact on hardware. This was again demonstrated as well with the famous affair of the destruction of Iranian centrifuge uranium enrichment facilities through hacking.

The scary part is with our increasingly connected hardware – cars, key house control systems – our vulnerability has probably increased many times over the situation a decade ago. There is probably something to be done to ensure that our infrastructures remain secure in the future!

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