Securing the Participation of Safety-Critical SCADA Systems in the Industrial Internet of Things

In the past, industrial control systems were ‘air gapped’ and isolated from more conventional networks. They used specialist protocols, such as Modbus, that are very different from TCP/IP. Individual devices used proprietary operating systems rather than the more familiar Linux or Windows. However, things are changing. There is a move for greater connectivity – for instance so that higher-level enterprise management systems can exchange information that helps optimise production processes. At the same time, industrial systems have been influenced by concepts from the Internet of Things; where the information derived from sensors and actuators in domestic and industrial components can be addressed through network interfaces. This paper identifies a range of cyber security and safety concerns that arise from these developments. The closing sections introduce potential solutions and identify areas for future research

Identity principles in the digital age: a closer view

Identity and its management is now an integral part of web-based services and applications. It is also a live political issue that has captured the interest of organisations, businesses and society generally. As identity management systems assume functionally equivalent roles, their significance for privacy cannot be underestimated. The Centre for Democracy and Technology has recently released a draft version of what it regards as key privacy principles for identity management in the digital age. This paper will provide an overview of the key benchmarks identified by the CDT. The focus of this paper is to explore how best the Data Protection legislation can be said to provide a framework which best maintains a proper balance between 'identity' conscious technology and an individual's expectation of privacy to personal and sensitive data. The central argument will be that increased compliance with the key principles is not only appropriate for a distributed privacy environment but will go some way towards creating a space for various stakeholders to reach consensus applicable to existing and new information communication technologies. The conclusion is that securing compliance with the legislation will prove to be the biggest governance challenge. Standard setting and norms will go some way to ease the need for centralised regulatory oversight

Defending Against Firmware Cyber Attacks on Safety-Critical Systems

In the past, it was not possible to update the underlying software in many industrial control devices. Engineering teams had to ‘rip and replace’ obsolete components. However, the ability to make firmware updates has provided significant benefits to the companies who use Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), switches, gateways and bridges as well as an array of smart sensor/actuators. These updates include security patches when vulnerabilities are identified in existing devices; they can be distributed by physical media but are increasingly downloaded over Internet connections. These mechanisms pose a growing threat to the cyber security of safety-critical applications, which are illustrated by recent attacks on safety-related infrastructures across the Ukraine. Subsequent sections explain how malware can be distributed within firmware updates. Even when attackers cannot reverse engineer the code necessary to disguise their attack, they can undermine a device by forcing it into a constant upload cycle where the firmware installation never terminates. In this paper, we present means of mitigating the risks of firmware attack on safety-critical systems as part of wider initiatives to secure national critical infrastructures. Technical solutions, including firmware hashing, must be augmented by organizational measures to secure the supply chain within individual plants, across companies and throughout safety-related industries

ANCHOR: logically-centralized security for Software-Defined Networks

While the centralization of SDN brought advantages such as a faster pace of innovation, it also disrupted some of the natural defenses of traditional architectures against different threats. The literature on SDN has mostly been concerned with the functional side, despite some specific works concerning non-functional properties like 'security' or 'dependability'. Though addressing the latter in an ad-hoc, piecemeal way, may work, it will most likely lead to efficiency and effectiveness problems. We claim that the enforcement of non-functional properties as a pillar of SDN robustness calls for a systemic approach. As a general concept, we propose ANCHOR, a subsystem architecture that promotes the logical centralization of non-functional properties. To show the effectiveness of the concept, we focus on 'security' in this paper: we identify the current security gaps in SDNs and we populate the architecture middleware with the appropriate security mechanisms, in a global and consistent manner. Essential security mechanisms provided by anchor include reliable entropy and resilient pseudo-random generators, and protocols for secure registration and association of SDN devices. We claim and justify in the paper that centralizing such mechanisms is key for their effectiveness, by allowing us to: define and enforce global policies for those properties; reduce the complexity of controllers and forwarding devices; ensure higher levels of robustness for critical services; foster interoperability of the non-functional property enforcement mechanisms; and promote the security and resilience of the architecture itself. We discuss design and implementation aspects, and we prove and evaluate our algorithms and mechanisms, including the formalisation of the main protocols and the verification of their core security properties using the Tamarin prover.Comment: 42 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 5 algorithms, 139 reference

Applying Lessons from Cyber Attacks on Ukrainian Infrastructures to Secure Gateways onto the Industrial Internet of Things

Previous generations of safety-related industrial control systems were ‘air gapped’. In other words, process control components including Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and smart sensor/actuators were disconnected and isolated from local or wide area networks. This provided a degree of protection; attackers needed physical access to compromise control systems components. Over time this ‘air gap’ has gradually been eroded. Switches and gateways have subsequently interfaced industrial protocols, including Profibus and Modbus, so that data can be drawn from safety-related Operational Technology into enterprise information systems using TCP/IP. Senior management uses these links to monitor production processes and inform strategic planning. The Industrial Internet of Things represents another step in this evolution – enabling the coordination of physically distributed resources from a centralized location. The growing range and sophistication of these interconnections create additional security concerns for the operation and management of safety-critical systems. This paper uses lessons learned from recent attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructures to guide a forensic analysis of an IIoT switch. The intention is to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities that would enable similar attacks to be replicated across Europe and North America

An approach for formal analysis of the security of a water treatment testbed

This thesis focuses on securing critical infrastructures such as chemical plants, manufacturing units, and power generating plants against attacks that disrupt the information flow from one component to another. Such systems are controlled by an Industrial Control System (ICS) that includes controllers communicating with each other, and with physical sensors and actuators, using a communications network. Traditional security models partition the security universe into two worlds, secure and insecure, but in the real world the partitions often overlap and information is leaked even through the physical observation which makes it much harder to analyze a Cyber physical system (CPS). To overcome these, this thesis focus on the Multiple Security Domain Nondeducibility (MSDND) model to identify the vulnerable points of attack on the system that hide critical information as in the STUXNET virus rather than theft of information. It is shown how MSDND analysis, conducted on a realistic multi-stage water treatment testbed, is useful in enhancing the security of a water treatment plant. Based on the MSDND analysis, this thesis offers a thorough documentation on the vulnerable points of attack, invariants used for removing the vulnerabilities, and suggested design decisions that help in developing invariants --Abstract, page iii

An SDN-based architecture for security provisioning in Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) computing systems

The unstoppable adoption of cloud and fog computing is paving the way to developing innovative services, some requiring features not yet covered by either fog or cloud computing. Simultaneously, nowadays technology evolution is easing the monitoring of any kind of infrastructure, be it large or small, private or public, static or dynamic. The fog-to-cloud computing (F2C) paradigm recently came up to support foreseen and unforeseen services demands while simultaneously benefiting from the smart capacities of the edge devices. Inherited from cloud and fog computing, a challenging aspect in F2C is security provisioning. Unfortunately, security strategies employed by cloud computing require computation power not supported by devices at the edge of the network, whereas security strategies in fog are yet on their infancy. Put this way, in this paper we propose Software Defined Network (SDN)-based security management architecture based on a master/slave strategy. The proposed architecture is conceptually applied to a critical infrastructure (CI) scenario, thus analyzing the benefits F2C may bring for security provisioning in CIs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version