Blockchain Base firmware update of ICS Embedded Devices

Recently, Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are commonly used to control and monitor industrial process ranging from critical infrastructure to manufacturing. By using ICSs in information technology platform, vulnerabilities would be raising and security issues become more significant. Considering the sensitive role of these systems and its vulnerabilities, security policies must shed light on the whole system in order to eliminate vulnerabilities and ensure their acceptable security. Advanced ICS devices are generally designed with firmware update capabilities as a security issue. The common methodology for updating is client-server model. In this model as the requests for firmware updates raised, the traffic of network may be overwhelming. So in ICS environment which may have many embedded devices requesting simultaneous updates, the client-server model is not appropriate, and it also gives the attacker an opportunity to upload malicious file on the device. In this article, a firmware update is proposed to use blockchain technology. In the proposed scheme, an ICS embedded device requests its firmware update to blockchain nodes on a peer-to-peer decentralized network. Then it receives a response from a blockchain node that determines the firmware update. When the firmware is not the latest version, the embedded device will request a metadata file to download the latest firmware from a peer-to-peer firmware sharing network, including blockchain nodes. If the firmware version is up-to-date, the correctness of the firmware will be checked by the blockchain nodes. The proposed scheme ensures that the firmware of the embedded ICS devices is up to date and not manipulated.

Keywords:

ICS , Security , Blockchain , Firmware.