Homegrown encryption threatens millions of smart grid devices
Millions of thermostats and other smart devices could be under threat thanks to poor encryption, new research has revealed.
The Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) is one of the most widely used smart grid networkings standards in the world, but in what could be a nasty blow for the future of the Internet of Things, it has been discovered that over four million devices worldwide that rely on it could be sitting on a ticking time bomb.
The flaw was uncovered in a paper, ‘Dumb Crypto in Smart Grids: Practical Cryptanalysis of the Open Smart Grid Protocol’ by Portuguese security researchers Philipp Jovanovic and Samuel Neves, which shows that weak, homegrown cryptography means the devices can easily be hacked.
