Proof of aliveness
Chenglu Jin, Zheng Yang, Marten van Dijk, Jianying Zhou · 2019
In 2017, malware Triton was discovered in a petrol plant in Saudi Arabia, and it shut down the safety instrumented systems in the affected industrial control system without being noticed by the operators. If the malware was not discovered by a security company on time, it could leave the system running without any safety measures, and eventually lead to an explosion. To detect such attacks, one can track the running status of the devices in the field to know that they are still "alive". However, in practice, there yet does not exist an efficient and cryptographically secure mechanism/ protocol that can prove the aliveness of a device to control centers over an open network.