1,233 research outputs found
Vulnerability Analysis of Network Scanning on SCADA Systems
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) have controlled the regulation and management of Critical National Infrastructure environments for decades. With the demand for remote facilities to be controlled and monitored, industries have continued to adopt Internet technology into their ICS and SCADA systems so that their enterprise can span across international borders in order to meet the demand of modern living. Although this is a necessity, it could prove to be potentially dangerous. The devices that make up ICS and SCADA systems have bespoke purposes and are often inherently vulnerable and difficult to merge with newer technologies. The focus of this article is to explore, test, and critically analyse the use of network scanning tools against bespoke SCADA equipment in order to identify the issues with conducting asset discovery or service detection on SCADA systems with the same tools used on conventional IP networks. The observations and results of the experiments conducted are helpful in evaluating their feasibility and whether they have a negative impact on how they operate. This in turn helps deduce whether network scanners open a new set of vulnerabilities unique to SCADA systems
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
Efficient Passive ICS Device Discovery and Identification by MAC Address Correlation
Owing to a growing number of attacks, the assessment of Industrial Control
Systems (ICSs) has gained in importance. An integral part of an assessment is
the creation of a detailed inventory of all connected devices, enabling
vulnerability evaluations. For this purpose, scans of networks are crucial.
Active scanning, which generates irregular traffic, is a method to get an
overview of connected and active devices. Since such additional traffic may
lead to an unexpected behavior of devices, active scanning methods should be
avoided in critical infrastructure networks. In such cases, passive network
monitoring offers an alternative, which is often used in conjunction with
complex deep-packet inspection techniques. There are very few publications on
lightweight passive scanning methodologies for industrial networks. In this
paper, we propose a lightweight passive network monitoring technique using an
efficient Media Access Control (MAC) address-based identification of industrial
devices. Based on an incomplete set of known MAC address to device
associations, the presented method can guess correct device and vendor
information. Proving the feasibility of the method, an implementation is also
introduced and evaluated regarding its efficiency. The feasibility of
predicting a specific device/vendor combination is demonstrated by having
similar devices in the database. In our ICS testbed, we reached a host
discovery rate of 100% at an identification rate of more than 66%,
outperforming the results of existing tools.Comment: http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/ICS2018.
SCADA System Testbed for Cybersecurity Research Using Machine Learning Approach
This paper presents the development of a Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA) system testbed used for cybersecurity research. The testbed
consists of a water storage tank's control system, which is a stage in the
process of water treatment and distribution. Sophisticated cyber-attacks were
conducted against the testbed. During the attacks, the network traffic was
captured, and features were extracted from the traffic to build a dataset for
training and testing different machine learning algorithms. Five traditional
machine learning algorithms were trained to detect the attacks: Random Forest,
Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes and KNN. Then, the trained
machine learning models were built and deployed in the network, where new tests
were made using online network traffic. The performance obtained during the
training and testing of the machine learning models was compared to the
performance obtained during the online deployment of these models in the
network. The results show the efficiency of the machine learning models in
detecting the attacks in real time. The testbed provides a good understanding
of the effects and consequences of attacks on real SCADA environmentsComment: E-Preprin
STOP-IT: strategic, tactical, operational protection of water infrastructure against cyberphysical threats
Water supply and sanitation infrastructures are essential for our welfare, but vulnerable to several attack types facilitated by the ever-changing landscapes of the digital world. A cyber-attack on critical infrastructures could for example evolve along these threat vectors: chemical/biological contamination, physical or communications disruption between the network and the supervisory SCADA. Although conceptual and technological solutions to security and resilience are available, further work is required to bring them together in a risk management framework, strengthen the capacities of water utilities to systematically protect their systems, determine gaps in security technologies and improve risk management approaches. In particular, robust adaptable/flexible solutions for prevention, detection and mitigation of consequences in case of failure due to physical and cyber threats, their combination and cascading effects (from attacks to other critical infrastructure, i.e. energy) are still missing. There is (i) an urgent need to efficiently tackle cyber-physical security threats, (ii) an existing risk management gap in utilities’ practices and (iii) an un-tapped technology market potential for strategic, tactical and operational protection solutions for water infrastructure: how the H2020 STOP-IT project aims to bridge these gaps is presented in this paper.Postprint (published version
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