Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Semantic Support for Log Analysis of Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

Testing is a relevant activity for the development life-cycle of Safety Critical Embedded systems. In particular, much effort is spent for analysis and classification of test logs from SCADA subsystems, especially when failures occur. The human expertise is needful to understand the reasons of failures, for tracing back the errors, as well as to understand which requirements are affected by errors and which ones will be affected by eventual changes in the system design. Semantic techniques and full text search are used to support human experts for the analysis and classification of test logs, in order to speedup and improve the diagnosis phase. Moreover, retrieval of tests and requirements, which can be related to the current failure, is supported in order to allow the discovery of available alternatives and solutions for a better and faster investigation of the problem.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-2014, Embedded systems, testing, semantic discovery, ontology, big dat

Novel Intrusion Detection Mechanism with Low Overhead for SCADA Systems

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are a critical part of modern national critical infrastructure (CI) systems. Due to the rapid increase of sophisticated cyber threats with exponentially destructive effects, intrusion detection systems (IDS) must systematically evolve. Specific intrusion detection systems that reassure both high accuracy, low rate of false alarms and decreased overhead on the network traffic must be designed for SCADA systems. In this book chapter we present a novel IDS, namely K-OCSVM, that combines both the capability of detecting novel attacks with high accuracy, due to its core One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) classification mechanism and the ability to effectively distinguish real alarms from possible attacks under different circumstances, due to its internal recursive k-means clustering algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through extensive simulations that are conducted using realistic datasets extracted from small and medium sized HTB SCADA testbeds

Exploring the Limits of Early Predictive Maintenance in Wind Turbines Applying an Anomaly Detection Technique

The aim of the presented investigation is to explore the time gap between an anomaly appearance in continuously measured parameters of the device and a failure, related to the end of the remaining resource of the device-critical component. In this investigation, we propose a recurrent neural network to model the time series of the parameters of the healthy device to detect anomalies by comparing the predicted values with the ones actually measured. An experimental investigation was performed on SCADA estimates received from different wind turbines with failures. A recurrent neural network was used to predict the temperature of the gearbox. The comparison of the predicted temperature values and the actual measured ones showed that anomalies in the gearbox temperature could be detected up to 37 days before the failure of the device-critical component. The performed investigation compared different models that can be used for temperature time-series modeling and the influence of selected input features on the performance of temperature anomaly detection.publishedVersio