Specifically tailored industrial control systems (ICSs) attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, accentuating the need of ICS cyber security. The nature of these systems makes traditional IT security measures not suitable, requiring expressly developed security countermeasures. Within the past decades, research has been focused in network-based intrusion detection systems. With the appearance of software-defined networks (SDNs), new opportunities and challenges have shown up in the research community. This paper describes the potential benefits of using SDNs in industrial networks with security purposes and presents the set up and results of a pilot experiment carried out in a scaled physical implementation. The experimental set up consists in the detection of ICMP flood and packet payload alteration based on signature comparison. Results point to the potential viability of the technology for intrusion detection and the need of researching in architectural scalability.

In the last years, cyber security of Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) has become an important issue due to the discovery of sophisticated malware that by attacking Critical Infrastructures, could cause catastrophic safety results. Researches have been developing countermeasures to enhance cyber security for pre-Internet era systems, which are extremely vulnerable to threats. This paper presents the potential opportunities that Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides for the security enhancement of Industrial Control Networks. SDN permits a high level of configuration of a network by the separation of control and data planes. In this work, we describe the affinities between SDN and ICSs and we discuss about implementation strategies.

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