# Network Reconnaissance and Vulnerability Excavation of Secure DDS Systems

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes security vulnerabilities in Secure DDS systems, revealing how leaked handshake information can be exploited for network reconnaissance and targeted attacks, highlighting the need for improved confidentiality measures.

## Contribution

It introduces an attacker model leveraging handshake leaks and employs formal verification to demonstrate potential vulnerabilities in Secure DDS implementations.

## Key findings

- Leaked capability lists enable network topology inference.
- Attackers can perform targeted denial of service attacks.
- Vulnerabilities can be exploited for data bus partitioning.

## Abstract

Distribution Service (DDS) is a realtime peer-to-peer protocol that serves as a scalable middleware between distributed networked systems found in many Industrial IoT domains such as automotive, medical, energy, and defense. Since the initial ratification of the standard, specifications have introduced a Security Model and Service Plugin Interface (SPI) architecture, facilitating authenticated encryption and data centric access control while preserving interoperable data exchange. However, as Secure DDS v1.1, the default plugin specifications presently exchanges digitally signed capability lists of both participants in the clear during the crypto handshake for permission attestation; thus breaching confidentiality of the context of the connection. In this work, we present an attacker model that makes use of network reconnaissance afforded by this leaked context in conjunction with formal verification and model checking to arbitrarily reason about the underlying topology and reachability of information flow, enabling targeted attacks such as selective denial of service, adversarial partitioning of the data bus, or vulnerability excavation of vendor implementations.