Cyber-security of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

This master's thesis reports on security of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in the department of industrial engineering at UiT campus Narvik. The CPS targets connecting distinctive robots in the laboratory in the department of industrial engineering. The ultimate objective of the department is to propose such a system for the industry. The thesis focuses on the network architecture of the CPS and the availability principle of security. This report states three research questions that are aimed to be answered. The questions are: what a secure CPS architecture for the purpose of the existing system is, how far the current state of system is from the defined secure architecture, and how to reach the proposed architecture. Among the three question, the first questions has absorbed the most attention of this project. The reason is that a secure and robust architecture would provide a touchstone that makes answering the second and third questions easier. In order to answer the questions, Cisco SAFE for IoT threat defense for manufacturing approach is chosen. The architectural approach of Cisco SAFE for IoT, with similarities to the Cisco SAFE for secure campus networks, provides a secure network architecture based on business flows/use cases and defining related security capabilities. This approach supplies examples of scenarios, business flows, and security capabilities that encouraged selecting it. It should be noted that Cisco suggests its proprietary technologies for security capabilities. According to the need of the project owners and the fact that allocating funds are not favorable for them, all the suggested security capabilities are intended to be open-source, replacing the costly Cisco-proprietary suggestions. Utilizing the approach and the computer networking fundamentals resulted in the proposed secure network architecture. The proposed architecture is used as a touchstone to evaluate the existing state of the CPS in the department of industrial engineering. Following that, the required security measures are presented to approach the system to the proposed architecture. Attempting to apply the method of Cisco SAFE, the identities using the system and their specific activities are presented as the business flow. Based on the defined business flow, the required security capabilities are selected. Finally, utilizing the provided examples of Cisco SAFE documentations, a complete network architecture is generated. The architecture consists of five zones that include the main components, security capabilities, and networking devices (such as switches and access points). Investigating the current state of the CPS and evaluating it by the proposed architecture and the computer networking fundamentals, helped identifying six important shortcomings. Developing on the noted shortcomings, and identification of open-source alternatives for the Cisco-proprietary technologies, nine security measures are proposed. The goal is to perform all the security measures. Thus, the implementations and solutions for each security measure is noted at the end of the presented results. The security measures that require purchasing a device were not considered in this project. The reasons for this decision are the time-consuming process of selecting an option among different alternatives, and the prior need for grasping the features of the network with the proposed security capabilities; features such as amount and type of traffic inside the network, and possible incidents detected using an Intrusion Detection Prevention System. The attempts to construct a secure cyber-physical system is an everlasting procedure. New threats, best practices, guidelines, and standards are introduced on a daily basis. Moreover, business needs could vary from time to time. Therefore, the selected security life-cycle is required and encouraged to be used in order to supply a robust lasting cyber-physical system

A Survey on Energy Efficiency in Smart Homes and Smart Grids

Empowered by the emergence of novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as sensors and high-performance digital communication systems, Europe has adapted its electricity distribution network into a modern infrastructure known as a smart grid (SG). The benefits of this new infrastructure include precise and real-time capacity for measuring and monitoring the different energy-relevant parameters on the various points of the grid and for the remote operation and optimization of distribution. Furthermore, a new user profile is derived from this novel infrastructure, known as a prosumer (a user that can produce and consume energy to/from the grid), who can benefit from the features derived from applying advanced analytics and semantic technologies in the rich amount of big data generated by the different subsystems. However, this novel, highly interconnected infrastructure also presents some significant drawbacks, like those related to information security (IS). We provide a systematic literature survey of the ICT-empowered environments that comprise SGs and homes, and the application of modern artificial intelligence (AI) related technologies with sensor fusion systems and actuators, ensuring energy efficiency in such systems. Furthermore, we outline the current challenges and outlook for this field. These address new developments on microgrids, and data-driven energy efficiency that leads to better knowledge representation and decision-making for smart homes and SGsThis research was co-funded by Interreg Österreich-Bayern 2014–2020 programme project KI-Net: Bausteine für KI-basierte Optimierungen in der industriellen Fertigung (AB 292). This work is also supported by the ITEA3 OPTIMUM project and ITEA3 SCRATCH project, all of them funded by the Centro Tecnológico de Desarrollo Industrial (CDTI), Spain

A Survey on Industrial Control System Testbeds and Datasets for Security Research

The increasing digitization and interconnection of legacy Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) open new vulnerability surfaces, exposing such systems to malicious attackers. Furthermore, since ICSs are often employed in critical infrastructures (e.g., nuclear plants) and manufacturing companies (e.g., chemical industries), attacks can lead to devastating physical damages. In dealing with this security requirement, the research community focuses on developing new security mechanisms such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), facilitated by leveraging modern machine learning techniques. However, these algorithms require a testing platform and a considerable amount of data to be trained and tested accurately. To satisfy this prerequisite, Academia, Industry, and Government are increasingly proposing testbed (i.e., scaled-down versions of ICSs or simulations) to test the performances of the IDSs. Furthermore, to enable researchers to cross-validate security systems (e.g., security-by-design concepts or anomaly detectors), several datasets have been collected from testbeds and shared with the community. In this paper, we provide a deep and comprehensive overview of ICSs, presenting the architecture design, the employed devices, and the security protocols implemented. We then collect, compare, and describe testbeds and datasets in the literature, highlighting key challenges and design guidelines to keep in mind in the design phases. Furthermore, we enrich our work by reporting the best performing IDS algorithms tested on every dataset to create a baseline in state of the art for this field. Finally, driven by knowledge accumulated during this survey's development, we report advice and good practices on the development, the choice, and the utilization of testbeds, datasets, and IDSs

Grid Analysis of Radiological Data

IGI-Global Medical Information Science Discoveries Research Award 2009International audienceGrid technologies and infrastructures can contribute to harnessing the full power of computer-aided image analysis into clinical research and practice. Given the volume of data, the sensitivity of medical information, and the joint complexity of medical datasets and computations expected in clinical practice, the challenge is to fill the gap between the grid middleware and the requirements of clinical applications. This chapter reports on the goals, achievements and lessons learned from the AGIR (Grid Analysis of Radiological Data) project. AGIR addresses this challenge through a combined approach. On one hand, leveraging the grid middleware through core grid medical services (data management, responsiveness, compression, and workflows) targets the requirements of medical data processing applications. On the other hand, grid-enabling a panel of applications ranging from algorithmic research to clinical use cases both exploits and drives the development of the services

Cybersecurity of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: A Review

Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) manage critical infrastructures by controlling the processes based on the "physics" data gathered by edge sensor networks. Recent innovations in ubiquitous computing and communication technologies have prompted the rapid integration of highly interconnected systems to ICPSs. Hence, the "security by obscurity" principle provided by air-gapping is no longer followed. As the interconnectivity in ICPSs increases, so does the attack surface. Industrial vulnerability assessment reports have shown that a variety of new vulnerabilities have occurred due to this transition while the most common ones are related to weak boundary protection. Although there are existing surveys in this context, very little is mentioned regarding these reports. This paper bridges this gap by defining and reviewing ICPSs from a cybersecurity perspective. In particular, multi-dimensional adaptive attack taxonomy is presented and utilized for evaluating real-life ICPS cyber incidents. We also identify the general shortcomings and highlight the points that cause a gap in existing literature while defining future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figure