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

Hyperloop: A Cybersecurity Perspective

Hyperloop is among the most prominent future transportation systems. First introduced by Elon Musk, Hyperloop concept involves novel technologies to allow traveling at a maximum speed of 1220km/h, while guaranteeing sustainability. Due to the system's performance requirements and the critical infrastructure it represents, its safety and security need to be carefully considered. In cyber-physical systems, cyberattacks could lead to safety issues with catastrophic consequences, both on the population and the surrounding environment. Therefore, the cybersecurity of all the components and links in Hyperloop represents a fundamental challenge. To this day, no research investigated the cyber security of the technology used for Hyperloop. In this paper, we propose the first analysis of the cybersecurity challenges raised by Hyperloop technology. We base our analysis on the related works on Hyperloop, distilling the common features which will be likely to be present in the system. Furthermore, we provide an analysis of possible directions on the Hyperloop infrastructure management, together with their security concerns. Finally, we discuss possible countermeasures and future directions for the security of the future Hyperloop design.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

EVScout2.0: Electric Vehicle Profiling Through Charging Profile

EVs (Electric Vehicles) represent a green alternative to traditional fuel-powered vehicles. To enforce their widespread use, both the technical development and the security of users shall be guaranteed. Privacy of users represents one of the possible threats impairing EVs adoption. In particular, recent works showed the feasibility of identifying EVs based on the current exchanged during the charging phase. In fact, while the resource negotiation phase runs over secure communication protocols, the signal exchanged during the actual charging contains features peculiar to each EV. A suitable feature extractor can hence associate such features to each EV, in what is commonly known as profiling. In this paper, we propose EVScout2.0, an extended and improved version of our previously proposed framework to profile EVs based on their charging behavior. By exploiting the current and pilot signals exchanged during the charging phase, our scheme is able to extract features peculiar for each EV, allowing hence for their profiling. We implemented and tested EVScout2.0 over a set of real-world measurements considering over 7500 charging sessions from a total of 137 EVs. In particular, numerical results show the superiority of EVScout2.0 with respect to the previous version. EVScout2.0 can profile EVs, attaining a maximum of 0.88 recall and 0.88 precision. To the best of the authors' knowledge, these results set a new benchmark for upcoming privacy research for large datasets of EVs

EVExchange: A Relay Attack on Electric Vehicle Charging System

To support the increasing spread of Electric Vehicles (EVs), Charging Stations (CSs) are being installed worldwide. The new generation of CSs employs the Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G) paradigm by implementing novel standards such as the ISO 15118. This standard enables high-level communication between the vehicle and the charging column, helps manage the charge smartly, and simplifies the payment phase. This novel charging paradigm, which connects the Smart Grid to external networks (e.g., EVs and CSs), has not been thoroughly examined yet. Therefore, it may lead to dangerous vulnerability surfaces and new research challenges. In this paper, we present EVExchange, the first attack to steal energy during a charging session in a V2G communication: i.e., charging the attacker's car while letting the victim pay for it. Furthermore, if reverse charging flow is enabled, the attacker can even sell the energy available on the victim's car! Thus, getting the economic profit of this selling, and leaving the victim with a completely discharged battery. We developed a virtual and a physical testbed in which we validate the attack and prove its effectiveness in stealing the energy. To prevent the attack, we propose a lightweight modification of the ISO 15118 protocol to include a distance bounding algorithm. Finally, we validated the countermeasure on our testbeds. Our results show that the proposed countermeasure can identify all the relay attack attempts while being transparent to the user.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure