| Title | Implementation of Cyber-Physical Systems with Modbus Communication for Security Studies |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | Chattha, Haseeb Ahmed, Rehman, Muhammad Miftah Ur, Mustafa, Ghulam, Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Abid, Muhammad, Haq, Ehtisham Ul |
| Conference Name | 2021 International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ICCWS) |
| Keywords | Collaboration, composability, cyber-attack, Cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity education, Human Behavior, MATLAB/Simulink, Metrics, Modbus protocol, OpenPLC, policy governance, process control, Programmable logic devices, Protocols, pubcrawl, Real-time Systems, resilience, Resiliency, SCADA, Scalability, security, software packages |
| Abstract | Modbus is a popular industrial communication protocol supported by most automation devices. Despite its popularity, it is not a secure protocol because when it was developed, security was not a concern due to closed environments of industrial control systems. With the convergence of information technology and operational technology in recent years, the security of industrial control systems has become a serious concern. Due to the high availability requirements, it is not practical or feasible to do security experimentation of production systems. We present an implementation of cyber-physical systems with Modbus/TCP communication for real-time security testing. The proposed architecture consists of a process simulator, an IEC 61131-3 compliant programmable logic controller, and a human-machine interface, all communicating via Modbus/TCP protocol. We use Simulink as the process simulator. It does not have built-in support for the Modbus protocol. A contribution of the proposed work is to extend the functionality of Simulink with a custom block to enable Modbus communication. We use two case studies to demonstrate the utility of the cyber-physical system architecture. We can model complex industrial processes with this architecture, can launch cyber-attacks, and develop protection mechanisms. |
| DOI | 10.1109/ICCWS53234.2021.9702959 |
| Citation Key | chattha_implementation_2021 |
Implementation of Cyber-Physical Systems with Modbus Communication for Security Studies