Vulnerabilities in electronic systems that control prison doors could allow hackers or others to spring prisoners from their jail cells, according to researchers.
Some of the same vulnerabilities that the Stuxnet superworm used to sabotage centrifuges at a nuclear plant in Iran exist in the country's top high-security prisons, according to security consultant and engineer John Strauchs, who plans to discuss the issue and demonstrate an exploit against the systems at the DefCon hacker conference next week in Las Vegas.
Strauchs, who says he engineered or consulted on electronic security systems in more than 100 prisons, courthouses and police stations throughout the U.S. - including eight maximum-security prisons - says the prisons use programmable logic controllers to control locks on cells and other facility doors and gates. PLCs are the same devices that Stuxnet exploited to attack centrifuges in Iran.
"Most people don't know how a prison or jail is designed, that's why no one has ever paid attention to it," says Strauchs. "How many people know they're built with the same kind of PLC used in centrifuges?"
PLCs are small computers that can be programmed to control any number of things, such as the spinning of rotors, the dispensing of food into packaging on an assembly line or the opening of doors. Two models of PLCs made by the German-conglomerate Siemens were the target of Stuxnet, a sophisticated piece of malware discovered last year that was designed to intercept legitimate commands going to PLCs and replace them with malicious ones. Stuxnet's malicious commands are believed to have caused centrifuges in Iran to spin faster and slower than normal to sabotage the country's uranium enrichment capabilities.
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Now now, cars, prisons. What is left really??
