In industrial control systems, devices such as Programmable Logic Controllers
(PLCs) are commonly used to directly interact with sensors and actuators, and
perform local automatic control. PLCs run software on two different layers: a)
firmware (i.e. the OS) and b) control logic (processing sensor readings to
determine control actions). In this work, we discuss ladder logic bombs, i.e.
malware written in ladder logic (or one of the other IEC 61131-3-compatible
languages). Such malware would be inserted by an attacker into existing control
logic on a PLC, and either persistently change the behavior, or wait for
specific trigger signals to activate malicious behaviour. For example, the LLB
could replace legitimate sensor readings with manipulated values. We see the
concept of LLBs as a generalization of attacks such as the Stuxnet attack. We
introduce LLBs on an abstract level, and then demonstrate several designs based
on real PLC devices in our lab. In particular, we also focus on stealthy LLBs,
i.e. LLBs that are hard to detect by human operators manually validating the
program running in PLCs. In addition to introducing vulnerabilities on the
logic layer, we also discuss countermeasures and we propose two detection
techniques.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables, 1 algorith
