Industrial and Automation Control systems traditionally achieved security thanks to the use of proprietary protocols and isolation from the telecommunication networks. Nowadays, the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things poses new security challenges. In this paper, we first highlight the main security challenges that advocate for new risk assessment and security strategies.To this end we propose a security framework and advanced tools to properly manage vulnerabilities, and to timely react to the threats. The proposed architecture fills the gap between computer science and control theoretic approaches. The physical layers connected to Industrial Control Systems are prone to disrupt when facing cyber-attacks. Considering the modules of the proposed architecture, we focus on the development of a practical framework to compare information about physical faults and cyber-attacks. This strat-egy is implemented in the ATENA architecture which has been designed as an innovative solution for the protection of critical assets.
It is an established fact that the security of Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) strongly depends on the robustness of the underlying supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) network protocols (among other factors). This becomes especially evident when considering the extent to which certain protocols, designed with poor or nonexistent security mechanisms, have led to a considerable number of past incident reports affecting critical infrastructures and essential services. Considering the current situation, it is rather obvious why the proper auditing and analysis of SCADA protocols are considered as key when it comes to design and/or protect IACS infrastructures. However, while the security of some protocols, such as Modbus or DNP3, has already been extensively analyzed, the same cannot be said for other protocols and technologies being used in the same domain that have not received the same amount of attention. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive security analysis of the PCOM SCADA protocol, including a dissection of PCOM, a demonstration of several attacks scenarios on PCOM-based systems, and also an analysis of possible mitigation strategies against these potential attacks. Moreover, this paper also describes a number of open-source tools that we developed for further analysis and research of PCOM security aspects, including a PCOM Wireshark dissector, a Nmap NSE PCOM scan, multiple Metasploit PCOM modules, a set of Snort PCOM rules, and several network traffic datasets containing multiple samples of different types of PCOM operations.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, which are often used in several types of Essential Systems and Critical Infrastructures, depend on control devices such as Programmable Logic Controllers, Remote Terminal Units and Intelligent Electronic Devices. Such devices, which are deployed at the edge of the SCADA infrastructure, directly interface with the physical processes under control. They are often based on embedded systems
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are getting more vulnerable as they become increasingly interconnected with other systems. Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT) will bring new opportunities to business and society, along with new threats and security risks. One major change that ICS will face will be that of the dynamic network topology. Changes in the network architecture will affect the performance of the ICS along with the efficiency of the security mechanisms that are deployed. The current article investigates how changes in the network architecture of a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system affect the performance of an Intrusion Detection System IDS that is based on the One class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM). Also the article proposes an adaptive mechanism that can cope with such changes and can work in real time situations. The performance of the proposed adaptive IDS is tested using traces from a Hybrid ICS testbed with a dynamic topology.
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