Visualizing BACnet Data to Facilitate Humans in Building-Security Decision-Making

Abstract

Building automation systems (BAS) are interlinked networks of hardware and software, which monitor and control events in the buildings. One of the data communication protocols used in BAS is Building Automation and Control networking protocol (BACnet) which is an internationally adopted ISO standard for the communication between BAS devices. Although BAS focus on providing safety for inhabitants, decreasing the energy consumption of buildings and reducing their operational cost, their security suffers due to the inherent complexity of the modern day systems. The issues such as monitoring of BAS effectively present a significant challenge, i.e., BAS operators generally possess only partial situation awareness. Especially in large and inter-connected buildings, the operators face the challenge of spotting meaningful incidents within large amounts of simultaneously occurring events, causing the anomalies in the BAS network to go unobserved. In this paper, we present the techniques to analyze and visualize the data for several events from BAS devices in a way that determines the potential importance of such unusual events and helps with the building-security decision making. We implemented these techniques as a mobile (Android) based application for displaying application data and as tools to analyze the communication flows using directed graphs

A Generic Taxonomy for Steganography Methods

“…d) CPS Steganography: When CPS states are manipulated by pattern E1 to store secret data, classical approaches of anomaly detection can be performed to, e.g., determine the plausibility of the actuator values or the resulting sensor values (e.g., a temperature value might increase if the heating of a heater actuator is increased). Such anomaly detection can be achieved through entropy-and ML-based methods [152], [153]. This might be further enhanced using digital twins as references for anomaly detection.…”

The Security of Smart Buildings: a Systematic Literature Review

“…Their system show good performances at detection of known attacks such as who-is/who-has attacks, write property attacks, initialize routing table attacks, reinitialise device attacks, device communication control attacks, and flooding conformed service attacks. To help the manual detection of anomalies or attacks, researchers have developed a project to visualise and analyse data from BACNet [75]. This tool is aimed at system operators, it provide graphs, network message flow maps and more features to help in the real time security assessment.…”

Steganography for Cyber-physicalSystems

“…For instance, if a window is opened (to store a hidden bit) that is usually closed at night, it could trigger an alarm. One detection approach could also be to use an entropy-based analysis of BAS events or machine learning methods [15]. However, such a detection method would require the constant recording of all actuator states over time, i.e.…”