Recent malware, like Stuxnet and Flame, constitute a major threat to networked critical infrastructures (NCIs), e.g., power plants. They revealed several vulnerabilities in today's NCIs, but most importantly they highlighted the lack of an efficient scientific approach to conduct experiments that measure the impact of cyber threats on both the physical and the cyber parts of NCIs. In this paper, we present EPIC, a novel cyber-physical testbed, and a modern scientific instrument that can provide accurate assessments of the effects that cyber-attacks may have on the cyber and physical dimensions of NCIs. To meet the complexity of today's NCIs, EPIC employs an Emulab-based testbed to recreate the cyber part of NCIs and multiple software simulators for the physical part. Its main advantage is that it can support very accurate, real-time, repeatable, and realistic experiments with heterogeneous infrastructures. We show through several case studies how EPIC can be applied to explore the impact that cyber-attacks and Information and Communications Technology system disruptions have on critical infrastructures.

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Abstract:The fact that modern Networked Industrial Control Systems (NICS) depend on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), is well known. Although many studies have focused on the security of SCADA systems, today we still lack the proper understanding of the effects that cyber attacks have on NICS. In this paper we identify the communication and control logic implementation parameters that influence the outcome of attacks against NICS and that could be used as effective measures for increasing the resilience of industrial installations. The implemented scenario involves a powerful attacker that is able to send legitimate Modbus packets/commands to control hardware in order to bring the physical process into a critical state, i.e. dangerous, or more generally unwanted state of the system. The analysis uses a Boiling Water Power Plant to show that the outcome of cyber attacks is influenced by network delays, packet losses, background traffic and control logic scheduling time. The main goal of this paper is to start an exploration of cyber-physical effects in particular scenarios. This study is the first of its kind to analyze cyber-physical systems and provides insight to the way that the cyber realm affects the physical realm.

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