Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Research Articles

The Design of a Sliding Rectangular Waveguide Array Antenna for Beam Steering

In this paper, we designed a sliding waveguide array antenna that can be beam-steered via mechanical manipulation. This reduces the vulnerability of electronic beam-steering radars mounted on ships or aircraft to electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks. The design frequency was 9.375 GHz. First, the proposed antenna was designed to adjust the phase difference between the arrayed waveguide antennas by changing the length of the rectangular waveguide using a slide. Subsequently, a ridge structure with optimized curvature was attached to the aperture of the rectangular waveguide to obtain stable reflection coefficient characteristics. Finally, eight rectangular waveguide antennas and two dummy antennas were E-plane arrayed at intervals of 0.8λ (25.6 mm) to obtain a beam width of nearly 8°. A beam width of 8° was then obtained by adjusting the length of each waveguide. It was possible to orient the beam of the antenna in intervals of 8° using the phase difference of each antenna. The proposed mechanical beam steering technique can replace electronic beam steering for radar antennas, rendering the structures less vulnerable to EMP attacks.

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Low Cost and Sustainable Test Methods to Study Vulnerabilities of Large-Scale Systems against EMP

Intense electromagnetic pulses are electromagnetic waves with sharp rise time, high field strength and short duration. They have attracted more and more attention in recent years because they can cause destructions or malfunctions of some key national core infrastructures, such as power grids, communication and financial networks, etc. Hence, it is important to harden these facilities to ensure that they can survive in the face of electromagnetic pulse attacks. A direct way to investigate the vulnerabilities of these facilities is placing them in the electromagnetic environments generated by EMP simulators. However, the scale of facilities under test are limited by the working volumes of simulators. With the increase in working volumes and field strength, the price and technical difficulty of simulators are increased. Therefore, low cost and sustainable test methods to investigate vulnerabilities of large-scale systems against EMP are proposed in this study. The study takes advantage of continuous wave immersion (CWI) test and pulse current injection (PCI) test methods, which are low cost and sustainable to predict the pulse responses and assess the nonlinear effect of large-scale facilities under EMP attacks. In a CWI test, the magnitude of the transfer function of large-scale systems or facilities can be measured, and the corresponding phase information of the transfer function can be reconstructed by minimum phase algorithm (MPA) if the systems meet the minimum phase condition. After acquiring the entire information of the transfer function, we can predict the responses of a system under threat-level EMP attacks. However, these responses are obtained under the assumption that the system does not have nonlinear effects. Because the CWI is a low-level test, it cannot simulate the threat-level EMP attacks. In the PCI test proposed here, a bulky pulse current is coupled into the system to stimulate enough current intensity, just as the system was attacked by threat-level EMPs. In this situation, the system would be destroyed, or any other nonlinear effect would occur in the system. After that, the problem is to determine the quantities of the injected current, and a few kinds of norms are introduced in this paper to define the quantities. The method proposed here innovatively takes the experimental results of CWI as reference inputs of PCI tests. In this paper, the accuracy of the response prediction is validated by means of simulations and experiments. Results show that as a low-level test method in the frequency domain, the CWI test method can not only analyze couplings of external electromagnetic energy from frequency domain but also predict responses of the facilities under high amplitude electromagnetic pulses. The nonlinear effect of large-scale facilities can be assessed by applying the PCI test method with the results from CWI prediction. Therefore, if infrastructures or facilities are too large to be tested under EMP simulators, an alternative approach is to carry out the CWI and PCI experiments.

뉴 스페이스 시대의 우주무기화에 대한 국제법적 고찰: 국제인도법 원칙을 중심으로

Space development, which started in earnest from the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, has now entered the so-called New-Space era. Private entities are playing a more leading role in the development of the outer space than the militaries and governments. This New-Space will bring more convenience and benefits to our lives. Meanwhile, as we has become more dependent on space, our vulnerability to the space environment is getting bigger. Low-Earth orbit is experiencing unprecedented congestion due to the increase in the number of newly launched satellites and junk satellites that do not work any more. This vulnerability will be further exacerbated by the space-weaponization movements where states seek to gain space superiority by using space militarily. Under these circumstances, if an armed conflict take place in the outer space, collateral damage to the civilian sector is highly likely to occur. Therefore, a careful approach is required in selecting the target, means, and method of attack in an armed conflict in the outer space. We should consider the most important norms under international humanitarian law. These are the principle of distinction, the principle of proportionality, the principle of prevention, and the principle of prohibition of indiscriminate attacks. A person planning an armed attack should make a clear distinction between military satellites and commercial satellites in determining the target of the attack and can attack only on military objectives that makes an effective contribution to military activities in nature, location, purpose, and use, and that bring definite advantages to the armed forces. In addition, in case of attacking a dual-use space object which serves as commercial and military purposes, a person planning the attack should consider the damage to the civilian sector. Furthermore, all practicable measures should be taken to avoid and minimize such collateral damage, and indiscriminate attack is also prohibited. In terms of methods of attack, various attack methods such as directed energy weapons, electromagnetic pulse attack weapons, electronic attack weapons, and cyber attacks have been developed to be used in the outer space as well as the kinetic ASAT weapons. Kinetic ASAT attacks that generate a large amount of space debris should be avoided because the damage to civilians and civilian objects by space debris can be huge. Therefore, an attack in the outer space should be conducted in a non-kinetic method. Even among the non-kinetic methods, only those methods that temporarily disrupt or disable the function of a satellite should be permitted in order to minimize the damage to civilians while achieving military objectives.

Deep Exploration on Fault Model of Electromagnetic Pulse Attack

The efficient fault injection attack (FIA) technique, electromagnetic pulse attack (EMPA), becomes a severe threat to the security of integrated circuits (ICs). Understanding the fault model of EMPA is necessary to protect ICs against EMPA. This work investigates the fault model of EMPA on digital circuits in depth by exploring its fault behaviors, fault conditions and fault causes. During exploration, a new kind of sampling fault model, called S-sampling fault model, is found. By adding the new finding, the fault models of EMPA can be built, fully covering the combinational and sequential digital circuits, the positive and negative polarity of EM pulse, and the signals processed by the circuits. The investigation is carried out based on the circuit-level simulation, considering the disturbances on the IC power and ground grids caused by EMPA. The insights into the EMPA fault models allow circuit designers to design more efficient countermeasures against EMPA.

On the efficient design of network resilient to electro-magnetic pulse attack—elastic optical network case study

The rising popularity of the telecommunication networks and their growing support in our every-day life make them a potential target of various security threats and malicious attacks. The international security organizations warn against increasing likelihood of nuclear weapon or electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attacks, which can be extremely harmful also for the networks. On that background, we study efficient design of a network resilient to the EMP attack wherein the required protection level is provided by the application of multipath routing and military grade bunkers (advanced electro-magnetic radiation resilient approaches protecting whole network node) implementation. Formally, we define and study the problem of bunkers location, routing and spectrum allocation (BLRSA) in an elastic optical network (EON). In the problem objective we address two criteria — network resilience (measured by the average lost flow per potential attack) and spectrum usage. For that problem we propose integer linear programming (ILP) model and two dedicated heuristics — 1S-RSA and 2S-RSA. Then, we perform extensive numerical experiments divided into three parts: (i) tuning of the proposed approaches, (ii) comparison with reference methods, (iii) realistic case study — efficient EMP-resilient network design. In the case study we analyze benefits and costs (especially in terms of the spectrum usage) of the proposed protection scheme. Moreover, we also analyze vulnerabilities of three realistic network topologies to the EMP attacks and identify their critical nodes. The investigation proves high efficiency of the proposed approaches and shows that they allow to save up to 90% of the traffic lost in the case of no protection against these types of attacks.

Combined software and hardware fault injection vulnerability detection

Fault injection is a well-known method to test the robustness and security vulnerabilities of software. Software-based and hardware-based approaches have been used to detect fault injection vulnerabilities. Software-based approaches typically rely upon simulations that can provide broad and rapid coverage, but may not correlate with genuine hardware vulnerabilities. Hardware-based experiments are indisputable in their results, but rely upon expensive expert knowledge and manual testing yielding ad hoc and extremely limited results. Further, there is very limited connection between software-based simulation results and hardware-based experiments. This work bridges software-based and hardware-based fault injection vulnerability detection by contrasting results of both approaches. This demonstrates that: not all software-based vulnerabilities can be reproduced in hardware; prior conjectures on the fault model for electromagnetic pulse attacks may not be accurate; and that there is a co-relation between software-based and hardware-based approaches. Further, combining both approaches can yield a vastly more accurate and efficient approach to detecting genuine fault injection vulnerabilities.

Risk‐aware last‐minute data backup in inter‐datacenter networks

Network failure caused by disasters (both natural and man-made like earthquakes, floods, cyclones, electromagnetic pulse attacks etc.) result in communication disruption and huge amounts of data loss in the backbone datacenter (DC) networks. To prevent such large-scale network disruptions and quickly resume connectivity after the disaster, network operators require improved and efficient data-transfer algorithms in geographically distributed (geo-distributed) optical inter-DC networks. Minimising loss of infrastructure and preventing network disruption requires estimating the damage from a possible disaster. In this study, the authors consider a mutual backup model, where DCs can serve as backup sites of each other, thereby significantly reducing the backup duration (i.e. DC-Backup-Window (DC-B-Wnd)). They specifically consider the joint optimisation of probabilistic backup site selection and the amount of data to be backed up. They propose mixed-integer linear programming models for backup time minimisation using a single DC as well as dual DCs at backup sites. Further, they investigate the trade-off between DC-B-Wnd and the computational complexity of the proposed algorithms and perform extensive numerical simulations to show that, in the case of disasters, single and dual DC backups with risk-aware probabilistic path selection give shorter backup windows as compared to existing algorithms.

Modeling Geographically Correlated Failures to Assess Network Vulnerability

Current communication networks are facing more and more threats from large-scale regional damages, such as natural disasters (e.g., earthquake or tornado) and physical attacks (e.g., electromagnetic pulse attack or dragging anchors). Recently, several region failure models have been proposed to evaluate the impact of such geographically correlated failures on communication networks. These works mainly adopt a kind of “deterministic” models, where network components within the affected area would fail simultaneously. Such failure models simplify the analysis but may fail to reflect some important behaviors of attacks and thus cause significant over- or under-estimation of region failures. To emulate the impact of realistic catastrophe events such as earthquake and tornado, this paper introduces two probabilistic failure models: 1) a concentric circle model and 2) a line segment model. In the probabilistic models, both the location and effect of the damage are treated as random events. The failure may randomly incur on the entire network plane, and the failure probability of a device depends on many factors, e.g., link length and distance to the damage center. We develop an efficient grid partition-based scheme to estimate the network vulnerability. Based on the grid partition scheme, we further develop a sampling scheme to significantly reduce the computation cost. The probability model helps us more deeply understand the network behaviors under region failure and facilitates the design and maintenance of future highly survivable mission critical networks.

The Resilience of WDM Networks to Probabilistic Geographical Failures

Telecommunications networks, and in particular optical WDM networks, are vulnerable to large-scale failures in their physical infrastructure, resulting from physical attacks (such as an electromagnetic pulse attack) or natural disasters (such as solar flares, earthquakes, and floods). Such events happen at specific geographical locations and disrupt specific parts of the network, but their effects cannot be determined exactly in advance. Therefore, we provide a unified framework to model network vulnerability when the event has a probabilistic nature, defined by an arbitrary probability density function. Our framework captures scenarios with a number of simultaneous attacks, when network components consist of several dependent subcomponents, and in which either a 1+1 or a 1:1 protection plan is in place. We use computational geometric tools to provide efficient algorithms to identify vulnerable points within the network under various metrics. Then, we obtain numerical results for specific backbone networks, demonstrating the applicability of our algorithms to real-world scenarios. Our novel approach allows to identify locations that require additional protection efforts (e.g., equipment shielding). Overall, the paper demonstrates that using computational geometric techniques can significantly contribute to our understanding of network resilience.