Eric Byres, chief technology officer for Tofino Security, a Belden brand, was in the audience at the S4 meeting, and has the following comment:
“Yes I saw the HART talk and it is real – the guy could do a number of nasty things over HART and to HART devices and HART masters. Of course, it requires physical access to the HART wiring (unless HART-IP is involved, which removes that requirement), but sneaking over a fence and getting to a level transmitter sitting on some tank in the far corner of the site shouldn’t be that hard (at least not hard on some of the sites I have been to).
“And once you get to one transmitter, you can rule them all. And if the asset management system that is the master is as flawed as the master he showed us, themn it won’t be long before you owned the entire asset management system and everything it talks to. In all, a nice back door into the site.”