203 research outputs found
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
Contextualisation of Data Flow Diagrams for security analysis
Data flow diagrams (DFDs) are popular for sketching systems for subsequent threat modelling. Their limited semantics make reasoning about them difficult, but enriching them endangers their simplicity and subsequent ease of take up. We present an approach for reasoning about tainted data flows in design-level DFDs by putting them in context with other complementary usability and requirements models. We illustrate our approach using a pilot study, where tainted data flows were identified without any augmentations to either the DFD or its complementary models
Design and Implementation of Attack-Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems
Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of security-related incidents in control systems. These include high-profile attacks in a wide range of application domains, from attacks on critical infrastructure, as in the case of the Maroochy Water breach [1], and industrial systems (such as the StuxNet virus attack on an industrial supervisory control and data acquisition system [2], [3] and the German Steel Mill cyberattack [4], [5]), to attacks on modern vehicles [6]-[8]. Even high-assurance military systems were shown to be vulnerable to attacks, as illustrated in the highly publicized downing of the RQ-170 Sentinel U.S. drone [9]-[11]. These incidents have greatly raised awareness of the need for security in cyberphysical systems (CPSs), which feature tight coupling of computation and communication substrates with sensing and actuation components. However, the complexity and heterogeneity of this next generation of safety-critical, networked, and embedded control systems have challenged the existing design methods in which security is usually consider as an afterthought
"Water, Water, Every Where": Nuances for a Water Industry Critical Infrastructure Specification Exemplar
The water infrastructure is critical to human life, but little attention has been paid to the nuances of the water industry. Without such attention, evaluating security innovation in this domain without compromising the productivity goals when delivering water services is difficult. This paper proposes four nuances that need to be incorporated into a representative specification exemplar for the water industry; these provided input to the exemplar based on a fictional water company
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