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

Design Considerations for Building Credible Security Testbeds:A Systematic Study of Industrial Control System Use Cases

This paper presents a mapping framework for design factors and implementation process for building credible Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security testbeds. The resilience of ICSs has become a critical concern to operators and governments following widely publicised cyber security events. The inability to apply conventional Information Technology security practice to ICSs further compounds challenges in adequately securing critical systems. To overcome these challenges, and do so without impacting live environments, testbeds for the exploration, development and evaluation of security controls are widely used. However, how a testbed is designed and its attributes, can directly impact not only its viability but also its credibility as a whole. Through a combined systematic and thematic analysis and mapping of ICS security testbed design attributes, this paper suggests that the expertise of human experimenters, design objectives, the implementation approach, architectural coverage, core characteristics, and evaluation methods; are considerations that can help establish or enhance confidence, trustworthiness and acceptance; thus, credibility of ICS security testbeds

MICRO-CI: A Testbed for Cyber-Security Research

A significant challenge for governments around the globe is the need to improve the level of awareness for citizens and businesses about the threats that exist in cyberspace. The arrival of new information technologies has resulted in different types of criminal activities, which previously did not exist, with the potential to cause extensive damage. Given the fact that the Internet is boundary-less, it makes it difficult to identify where attacks originate from and how to counter them. The only solution is to improve the level of support for security systems and evolve the defences against cyber-attacks. This project supports the development of critical infrastructure security research, in the fight against a growing threat from the digital domain. However, the real-world evaluation of emerging security systems for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems is impractical. The research project furthers the knowledge and understanding of Information Systems; specifically acting as a facilitator for cyber-security research. In this paper, the construction of a testbed and datasets for cyber-security and critical infrastructure research are presented

Design Considerations for Building Credible Security Testbeds: Perspectives from Industrial Control System Use Cases

This paper presents a mapping framework for design factors and an implementation process for building credible Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security testbeds. The security and resilience of ICSs has become a critical concern to operators and governments following widely publicised cyber security events. The inability to apply conventional Information Technology security practice to ICSs further compounds challenges in adequately securing critical systems. To overcome these challenges, and do so without impacting live environments, testbeds are widely used for the exploration, development, and evaluation of security controls. However, how a testbed is designed and its attributes, can directly impact not only its viability but also its credibility. Combining systematic and thematic analysis, and the mapping of identified ICS security testbed design attributes, we propose a novel relationship map of credibility-supporting design factors (and their associated attributes) and a process implementation flow structure for ICS security testbeds. The framework and implementation process highlight the significance of demonstrating some design factors such as user/experimenter expertise, clearly defined testbed design objectives, simulation implementation approach, covered architectural components, core structural and functional characteristics covered, and evaluations to enhance confidence, trustworthiness and acceptance of ICS security testbeds as credible. These can streamline testbed requirement definition, improve design consistency and quality while reducing implementation costs

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

Application Perspective on Cybersecurity Testbed for Industrial Control Systems

The low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies, which enable cost and energy-efficient wireless connectivity for massive deployments of autonomous machines, have enabled and boosted the development of many new Internet of things (IoT) applications; however, the security of LPWA technologies in general, and specifically those operating in the license-free frequency bands, have received somewhat limited attention so far. This paper focuses specifically on the security and privacy aspects of one of the most popular license-free-band LPWA technologies, which is named LoRaWAN. The paper’s key contributions are the details of the design and experimental validation of a security-focused testbed, based on the combination of software-defined radio (SDR) and GNU Radio software with a standalone LoRaWAN transceiver. By implementing the two practical man-in-the-middle attacks (i.e., the replay and bit-flipping attacks through intercepting the over-the-air activation procedure by an external to the network attacker device), we demonstrate that the developed testbed enables practical experiments for on-air security in real-life conditions. This makes the designed testbed perspective for validating the novel security solutions and approaches and draws attention to some of the relevant security challenges extant in LoRaWAN

Model kesediaan pelaksanaan sistem kawalan industri di persekitaran awan dari perspektif keselamatan maklumat

Persekitaran awan adalah satu bidang yang pesat berkembang dengan keupayaan mengakses perkhidmatan dari mana sahaja dan pada bila-bila masa. Sistem Kawalan Industri atau ICS adalah istilah umum untuk sistem kawalan yang digunakan di dalam infrastruktur kritikal. Apabila ICS dilaksanakan di persekitaran awan, keselamatan maklumat menjadi satu kebimbangan utama bagi organisasi ICS. Sebelum melaksanakan ICS ke awan, penting bagi organisasi ICS untuk bersedia kerana kurang kesediaan boleh membawa kepada kegagalan dalam pelaksanaannya. Oleh itu objektif utama kajian ini adalah untuk mencadangkan Model Kesediaan Pelaksanaan ICS di persekitaran awan (RMfIC) dari perspektif keselamatan maklumat. RMfIC terdiri daripada tiga komponen utama iaitu komponen pertama ialah analisis kesesuaian, komponen kedua, mengukur kesediaan dari perspektif keselamatan maklumat, dan komponen ketiga ialah pengiraan kesediaan organisasi ICS yang juga akan mengenal pasti tahap kesediaan sesebuah organisasi. Sumbangan utama RMfIC adalah organisasi ICS boleh mengenal pasti tahap kesediaan dan menangani cabaran sebelum melaksanakan perkhidamatan ICS di persekitaran awan

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2011

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2014

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics