3,921 research outputs found
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
Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey
The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to
ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability
issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid
(SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical
power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side
management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will
bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system.
For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time
consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built
on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG
systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue.
Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the
communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey
on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of
SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case
studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for
SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes
applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and
future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte
Factory modelling: data guidance for analysing production, utility and building architecture systems
Work on energy and resource reduction in factories is dependent on the availability of data. Typically, available sources are incomplete or inappropriate for direct use and manipulation is required. Identifying new improvement opportunities through simulation across factory production, utility and building architecture domains requires analysis of model feasibility, particularly in terms of system data composition, input resolution and simulation result fidelity. This paper reviews literature on developing appropriate model data for assessing energy and material flows at factory level. Gaps are found in guidance for analysis and integration of resource-flows across system boundaries. The process for how data was prepared, input and iteratively developed alongside conceptual and simulation models is described. The case of a large-scale UK manufacturer is presented alongside discussions on challenges associated with factory level modelling, and the insights gained from understanding the effect of data clarity on system performance
MiniCPS: A toolkit for security research on CPS Networks
In recent years, tremendous effort has been spent to modernizing
communication infrastructure in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as Industrial
Control Systems (ICS) and related Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
(SCADA) systems. While a great amount of research has been conducted on network
security of office and home networks, recently the security of CPS and related
systems has gained a lot of attention. Unfortunately, real-world CPS are often
not open to security researchers, and as a result very few reference systems
and topologies are available. In this work, we present MiniCPS, a CPS
simulation toolbox intended to alleviate this problem. The goal of MiniCPS is
to create an extensible, reproducible research environment targeted to
communications and physical-layer interactions in CPS. MiniCPS builds on
Mininet to provide lightweight real-time network emulation, and extends Mininet
with tools to simulate typical CPS components such as programmable logic
controllers, which use industrial protocols (Ethernet/IP, Modbus/TCP). In
addition, MiniCPS defines a simple API to enable physical-layer interaction
simulation. In this work, we demonstrate applications of MiniCPS in two example
scenarios, and show how MiniCPS can be used to develop attacks and defenses
that are directly applicable to real systems.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 code listin
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
A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures
This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes
Impact Assessment of Hypothesized Cyberattacks on Interconnected Bulk Power Systems
The first-ever Ukraine cyberattack on power grid has proven its devastation
by hacking into their critical cyber assets. With administrative privileges
accessing substation networks/local control centers, one intelligent way of
coordinated cyberattacks is to execute a series of disruptive switching
executions on multiple substations using compromised supervisory control and
data acquisition (SCADA) systems. These actions can cause significant impacts
to an interconnected power grid. Unlike the previous power blackouts, such
high-impact initiating events can aggravate operating conditions, initiating
instability that may lead to system-wide cascading failure. A systemic
evaluation of "nightmare" scenarios is highly desirable for asset owners to
manage and prioritize the maintenance and investment in protecting their
cyberinfrastructure. This survey paper is a conceptual expansion of real-time
monitoring, anomaly detection, impact analyses, and mitigation (RAIM) framework
that emphasizes on the resulting impacts, both on steady-state and dynamic
aspects of power system stability. Hypothetically, we associate the
combinatorial analyses of steady state on substations/components outages and
dynamics of the sequential switching orders as part of the permutation. The
expanded framework includes (1) critical/noncritical combination verification,
(2) cascade confirmation, and (3) combination re-evaluation. This paper ends
with a discussion of the open issues for metrics and future design pertaining
the impact quantification of cyber-related contingencies
Reactive Rules for Emergency Management
The goal of the following survey on Event-Condition-Action (ECA) Rules is to come to a common understanding and intuition on this topic within EMILI. Thus it does not give an academic overview on Event-Condition-Action Rules which would be valuable for computer scientists only. Instead the survey tries to introduce Event-Condition-Action Rules and their use for emergency management based on real-life examples from the use-cases identified in Deliverable 3.1. In this way we hope to address both, computer scientists and security experts, by showing how the Event-Condition-Action Rule technology can help to solve security issues in emergency management. The survey incorporates information from other work packages, particularly from Deliverable D3.1 and its Annexes, D4.1, D2.1 and D6.2 wherever possible
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