HASELNUSS

Fraunhofer SIT
Last updated on Feb 26, 2021

Hardware-based Safety Platform for Railroad Control and Safety Technology

Information technology (IT) is increasingly being used to introduce new functionalities and increase process efficiency in rail facilities. However, as a result of the digitization of rail infrastructure and the networking of control and safety technology, the risk of IT attacks is also increasing. Since rail facilities are also part of Germany’s critical infrastructures, they are accordingly heavily regulated by the IT Security Act. This digital transformation of the railroad leads to new demands on IT-based systems in the railroad sector and requires new IT security solutions.

The aim of the HASELNUSS research project is to develop a hardware-based security platform for control and safety technology that is adapted to the specific requirements of railroads and provides necessary IT security functions without affecting safety. The platform offers measures to ensure system integrity and provides the basis for secure networking of the railroad infrastructure.

The HASELNUSS architecture is based on a latest generation hardware security module, the “Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0”, which serves as a security anchor, and the microkernel-based operating system PikeOS, which allows secure coexistence of critical and non-critical applications and is easy to verify. On this basis, services for secure patch and update management, health monitoring, anomaly and attack detection will be implemented.

The developed security platform will then be implemented in demonstrators and tested in practice at the DB Netz AG test center and at the Darmstadt railroad operations field.

For more information please visit haselnuss-projekt.de.

FYI: HASELNUSS is the german word for HAZELNUT

Publications

Implementing a Security Architecture for Safety-Critical Railway Infrastructure

The digitalization of safety-critical railroad infrastructure enables new types of attacks. This increases the need to integrate Information Technology (IT) security measures into railroad systems. For that purpose, we rely on a security architecture for a railway object controller which controls field elements that we developed in previous work. Our architecture enables the integration of security mechanisms into a safety-certified railway system. In this paper, we demonstrate the practical feasibility of our architecture by using a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and a Multiple Independent Levels of Safety and Security (MILS) Separation Kernel (SK) for our implementation. Our evaluation includes a test bed and shows how certification and homologation can be achieved.
Michael Eckel, Don Kuzhiyelil, Christoph Krauß, Maria Zhdanova, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Jasmin Cosic, Matthias Drodt, Jean-Jacques Pitrolle
PDF Project DOI

A Security Architecture for Protecting Safety-Critical Railway Infrastructure

This article gives an overview of an IT security architecture, which allows to operate security measures on safety systems such as object controllers. It consists of a hardware platform with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, a MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Safety and Security) Separation Kernel (SK), and various security applications. The TPM serves as security anchor and enables, e.g., secure storage, measured boot, and remote attestation to detect tampering with the system software. The MILS OS ensures freedom of interference when running safety and security applications.
Christoph Krauß, Maria Zhdanova, Michael Eckel, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Markus Heinrich, Don Kuzhiyelil, Jasmin Cosic, Matthias Drodt
PDF Project