Biblio

In this work a data provenance system for grid-oriented applications is presented. The proposed Keyless Infrastructure Security Solution (KISS) provides mechanisms to store and maintain digital data fingerprints that can later be used to validate and assert data provenance using a time-based, hash tree mechanism. The developed solution has been designed to satisfy the stringent requirements of the modern power grid including execution time and storage necessities. Its applicability has been tested using a lab-scale, proof-of-concept deployment that secures an energy management system against the attack sequence observed on the 2016 Ukrainian power grid cyberattack. The results demonstrate a strong potential for enabling data provenance in a wide array of applications, including speed-sensitive applications such as those found in control room environments.

When the electrical grid in a region suffers a major outage, e.g., after a catastrophic cyber attack, a “black start” may be required, where the grid is slowly restarted, carefully and incrementally adding generating capacity and demand. To ensure safe and effective black start, the grid control center has to be able to communicate with field personnel and with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Voice and text communication are particularly critical. As part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation, and Characterization Systems (RADICS) program, we designed, tested and evaluated a self-configuring mesh network prototype called the Phoenix Secure Emergency Network (PhoenixSEN). PhoenixSEN provides a secure drop-in replacement for grid's primary communication networks during black start recovery. The network combines existing and new technologies, can work with a variety of link-layer protocols, emphasizes manageability and auto-configuration, and provides services and applications for coordination of people and devices including voice, text, and SCADA communication. We discuss the architecture of PhoenixSEN and evaluate a prototype on realistic grid infrastructure through a series of DARPA-led exercises.

The digitalization process did not circumvent either railway domain. With new technology and new functionality, such as digital interlocking system, automated train operation, object recognition, GPS positioning, traditional railway domain got a vulnerability that can be exploited. Another issue is usage of CotS (Commercial-of-the-Shelf) hardware and software and openness of traditionally closed system. Most of published similar paper are focused on cyber security and security & safety model for securing of assessment in this kind of domain, but this paper will deal with this upcoming railway technology and digital investigation process in such kind of environment. Digital investigation process will be presented, but not only in ICS and SCADA system, but also in specific, railway environment. Framework for investigation process and for maintaining chain of custody in railway domain will be proposed.

In smart girds, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have to protect data from advanced persistent threats (APTs), which exploit vulnerabilities of the power infrastructures to launch stealthy and targeted attacks. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based APT defense scheme for the control center to choose the detection interval and the number of Central Processing Units (CPUs) allocated to the data concentrators based on the data priority, the size of the collected meter data, the history detection delay, the previous number of allocated CPUs, and the size of the labeled compromised meter data without the knowledge of the attack interval and attack CPU allocation model. The proposed scheme combines deep learning and policy-gradient based actor-critic algorithm to accelerate the optimization speed at the control center, where an actor network uses the softmax distribution to choose the APT defense policy and the critic network updates the actor network weights to improve the computational performance. The advantage function is applied to reduce the variance of the policy gradient. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a performance gain over the benchmarks in terms of the detection delay, data protection level, and utility.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a professional stealthy threat actor who uses continuous and sophisticated attack techniques which have not been well mitigated by existing defense strategies. This paper proposes an APT-style cyber-attack tested for distributed energy resources (DER) in cyber-physical environments. The proposed security testbed consists of: 1) a real-time DER simulator; 2) a real-time cyber system using real network systems and a server; and 3) penetration testing tools generating APT-style attacks as cyber events. Moreover, this paper provides a cyber kill chain model for a DER system based on a latest MITRE’s cyber kill chain model to model possible attack stages. Several real cyber-attacks are created and their impacts in a DER system are provided to validate the feasibility of the proposed security testbed for DER systems.

The generation, transmission, distribution, and storage of electric power is becoming increasingly decentralized. Advances in Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are rapidly changing the nature of the power grid. Moreover, the accommodation of these new technologies by the legacy grid requires that an increasing number of devices be Internet connected so as to allow for sensor and actuator information to be collected, transmitted, and processed. With the wide adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of smart grid devices that can potentially affect the stability, reliability, and resilience of the power grid need to be carefully examined and addressed. This is especially true in situations in which smart grid devices are deployed with default configurations or without reasonable protections against malicious activities. While much work has been done to characterize the vulnerabilities associated with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Industrial Control System (ICS) devices, this paper demonstrates that similar vulnerabilities associated with the newer class of IoT smart grid devices are becoming a concern. Specifically, this paper first performs an evaluation of such devices using the Shodan platform and text processing techniques to analyze a potential vulnerability involving the lack of password protection. This work further explores several Shodan search terms that can be used to identify additional smart grid components that can be evaluated in terms of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Finally, this paper presents recommendations for the more secure deployment of such smart grid devices.

Nowadays, industrial control systems are increasingly subject to cyber-attacks. In this regard, the relevance of ICS modeling for security research and for teaching employees the basics of information security is increasing. Most of the existing testbeds for research on information security of industrial control systems are software and hardware solutions that contain elements of industrial equipment. However, when implementing distance-learning programs, it is not possible to fully use such testbeds. This paper describes the approach of complete virtualization of technological processes in ICS based on the open source programmable logic controller OpenPLC. This enables a complete information security training from any device with Internet access. A unique feature of this stand is also the support of several PLCs and a lower-level subsystem implemented by a distributed I/O system. The study describes the implementation scheme of the stand, and several case of reproduction of attacks. Scaling approaches for this solution are also considered.

With the increasing application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), cyberattacks have become more prevalent against Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) such as the modern power grids. Various methods have been proposed to model the cybersecurity threats, but so far limited studies have been focused on the defensive strategies subject to the limited security budget. In this paper, the power supply reliability is evaluated considering the strategic allocation of defense resources. Specifically, the optimal mixed strategies are formulated by the Stackelberg Security Game (SSG) to allocate the defense resources on multiple targets subject to cyberattacks. The cyberattacks against the intrusion-tolerant Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system are mathematically modeled by Semi-Markov Process (SMP) kernel. The intrusion tolerance capability of the SCADA system provides buffered residence time before the substation failure to enhance the network robustness against cyberattacks. Case studies of the cyberattack scenarios are carried out to demonstrate the intrusion tolerance capability. Depending on the defense resource allocation scheme, the intrusion-tolerant SCADA system possesses varying degrees of self-healing capability to restore to the good state and prevent the substations from failure. If more defense resources are invested on the substations, the intrusion tolerant capability can be further enhanced for protecting the substations. Finally, the actuarial insurance principle is designed to estimate transmission companies' individual premiums considering correlated cybersecurity risks. The proposed insurance premium principle is designed to provide incentive for investments on enhancing the intrusion tolerance capability, which is verified by the results of case studies.

Various Machine Learning techniques are considered to be "black-boxes" because of their limited interpretability and explainability. This cannot be afforded, especially in the domain of Cyber-Physical Systems, where there can be huge losses of infrastructure of industries and Governments. Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems need to detect and be protected from cyber-attacks. Thus, we need to adopt approaches that make the system secure, can explain predictions made by model, and interpret the model in a human-understandable format. Recently, Autoencoders have shown great success in attack detection in SCADA systems. Numerous interpretable machine learning techniques are developed to help us explain and interpret models. The work presented here is a novel approach to use techniques like Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) for interpretation of Autoencoder networks trained on a Gas Pipelines Control System to detect attacks in the system.

An open source and low-cost Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System based on Node-RED and Arduino microcontrollers is presented in this paper. The system is designed for monitoring, supervision, and remotely controlling motors and sensors deployed for oil and gas facilities. The Internet of Things (IoT) based SCADA system consists of a host computer on which a server is deployed using the Node-RED programming tool and two terminal units connected to it: Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega. The Arduino Uno collects and communicates the data acquired from the temperature, flowrate, and water level sensors to the Node-Red on the computer through the serial port. It also uses a local liquid crystal display (LCD) to display the temperature. Node-RED on the computer retrieves the data from the voltage, current, rotary, accelerometer, and distance sensors through the Arduino Mega. Also, a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) is created using Node-RED and hosted on the local server for parsing the collected data. Finally, an HTTP basic access authentication is implemented using Nginx to control the clients' access from the Internet to the local server and to enhance its security and reliability.

Security maintenance of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems has been a point of interest during recent years. Numerous research works have been dedicated to the design of intrusion detection systems for securing SCADA communications. Nevertheless, these data-driven techniques are usually dependant on the quality of the monitored data. In this work, we propose a novel feature selection approach, called MSFS, to tackle undesirable quality of data caused by feature redundancy. In contrast to most feature selection techniques, the proposed method models each class in a different subspace, where it is optimally discriminated. This has been accomplished by resorting to ensemble learning, which enables the usage of multiple feature sets in the same feature space. The proposed method is then utilized to perform intrusion detection in smaller subspaces, which brings about efficiency and accuracy. Moreover, a comparative study is performed on a number of advanced feature selection algorithms. Furthermore, a dataset obtained from the SCADA system of a gas pipeline is employed to enable a realistic simulation. The results indicate the proposed approach extensively improves the detection performance in terms of classification accuracy and standard deviation.

A Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system used in controlling or monitoring purpose in industrial process automation system is the process of collecting data from instruments and sensors located at remote sites and transmitting data at a central site. Most of the existing works on SCADA system focused on simulation-based study which cannot always mimic the real world situations. We propose a novel methodology that analyzes SCADA logs on offline basis and helps to detect process-related threats. This threat takes place when an attacker performs malicious actions after gaining user access. We conduct our experiments on a real-life SCADA system of a Power transmission utility. Our proposed methodology will automate the analysis of SCADA logs and systemically identify undesired events. Moreover, it will help to analyse process-related threats caused by user activity. Several test study suggest that our approach is powerful in detecting undesired events that might caused by possible malicious occurrence.

Recent cyberattacks targeting Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)/Industrial Control System(ICS) exploit weaknesses of host system software environment and take over the control of host processes in the host of the station network. We analyze the attack path of these attacks, which features how the attack hijacks the host in the network and compromises the operations of field device controllers. The paper proposes a host-based protection method, which can prevent malware penetration into the process memory by code injection attacks. The method consists of two protection schemes. One is to prevent file-based code injection such as DLL injection. The other is to prevent fileless code injection. The method traces changes in memory regions and determine whether the newly allocated memory is written with malicious codes. For this method, we show how a machine learning method can be adopted.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have been a frequent target of cyberattacks in Industrial Control Systems (ICS). As such systems are a frequent target of highly motivated attackers, researchers often resort to intrusion detection through machine learning techniques to detect new kinds of threats. However, current research initiatives, in general, pursue higher detection accuracies, neglecting the detection of new kind of threats and their proposal detection scope. This paper proposes a novel, reliable host-based intrusion detection for SCADA systems through the Operating System (OS) diversity. Our proposal evaluates, at the OS level, the SCADA communication over time and, opportunistically, detects, and chooses the most appropriate OS to be used in intrusion detection for reliability purposes. Experiments, performed through a variety of SCADA OSs front-end, shows that OS diversity provides higher intrusion detection scope, improving detection accuracy by up to 8 new attack categories. Besides, our proposal can opportunistically detect the most reliable OS that should be used for the current environment behavior, improving by up to 8%, on average, the system accuracy when compared to a single OS approach, in the best case.

Cybersecurity of the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, which is the key component of the cyber-physical systems (CPS), is facing big challenges and will affect the reliability of the smart grid. System reliability can be influenced by various cyber threats. In this paper, the reliability of the electric power system considering different cybersecurity issues in the SCADA system is analyzed by using Semi-Markov Process (SMP) and mean time-to-compromise (MTTC). External and insider attacks against the SCADA system are investigated with the SMP models and the results are compared. The system reliability is evaluated by reliability indexes including loss of load probability (LOLP) and expected energy not supplied (EENS) through Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS). The lurking threats of the cyberattacks are also analyzed in the study. Case studies were conducted on the IEEE Reliability Test System (RTS-96). The results show that with the increase of the MTTCs of the cyberattacks, the LOLP values decrease. When insider attacks are considered, both the LOLP and EENS values dramatically increase owing to the decreased MTTCs. The results provide insights into the establishment of the electric power system reliability enhancement strategies.

Reliable and secure grid operations become more and more challenging in context of increasing IT/OT convergence and decreasing dynamic margins in today's power systems. To ensure the correct operation of monitoring and control functions in control centres, an intelligent assessment of the different information sources is necessary to provide a robust data source in case of critical physical events as well as cyber-attacks. Within this paper, a holistic data stream assessment methodology is proposed using an expert knowledge based cyber-physical situational awareness for different steady and transient system states. This approach goes beyond existing techniques by combining high-resolution PMU data with SCADA information as well as Digital Twin and AI based anomaly detection functionalities.

Wide integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in modern power grids has brought many benefits as well as the risk of cyber attacks. A critical step towards defending grid cyber security is to understand the cyber-physical causal chain, which describes the progression of intrusion in cyber-space leading to the formation of consequences on the physical power grid. In this paper, we develop an attack vector for a time delay attack at load frequency control in the power grid. Distinct from existing works, which are separately focused on cyber intrusion, grid response, or testbed validation, the proposed attack vector for the first time provides a full cyber-physical causal chain. It targets specific vulnerabilities in the protocols, performs a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, induces the delays in control loop, and destabilizes grid frequency. The proposed attack vector is proved in theory, presented as an attack tree, and validated in an experimental environment. The results will provide valuable insights to develop security measures and robust controls against time delay attacks.

A rapid rise in cyber-attacks on Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) has been observed in the last decade. It becomes even more concerning that several of these attacks were on critical infrastructures that indeed succeeded and resulted into significant physical and financial damages. Experimental testbeds capable of providing flexible, scalable and interoperable platform for executing various cybersecurity experiments is highly in need by all stakeholders. A container-based SCADA testbed is presented in this work as a potential platform for executing cybersecurity experiments. Through this testbed, a network traffic containing ARP spoofing is generated that represents a Man in the middle (MITM) attack. While doing so, scanning of different systems within the network is performed which represents a reconnaissance attack. The network traffic generated by both ARP spoofing and network scanning are captured and further used for preparing a dataset. The dataset is utilized for training a network classification model through a machine learning algorithm. Performance of the trained model is evaluated through a series of tests where promising results are obtained.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are monitored and controlled by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that use advanced computing, sensors, control systems, and communication networks. At first, CPS and SCADA systems were protected and secured by isolation. However, with recent industrial technology advances, the increased connectivity of CPSs and SCADA systems to enterprise networks has uncovered them to new cybersecurity threats and made them a primary target for cyber-attacks with the potential of causing catastrophic economic, social, and environmental damage. Recent research focuses on new methodologies for risk modeling and assessment using game theory and reinforcement learning. This paperwork proposes to frame CPS security on two different levels, strategic and battlefield, by meeting ideas from game theory and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). The strategic level is modeled as imperfect information, extensive form game. Here, the human administrator and the malware author decide on the strategies of defense and attack, respectively. At the battlefield level, strategies are implemented by machine learning agents that derive optimal policies for run-time decisions. The outcomes of these policies manifest as the utility at a higher level, where we aim to reach a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in favor of the defender. We simulate the scenario of a virus spreading in the context of a CPS network. We present experiments using the MiniCPS simulator and the OpenAI Gym toolkit and discuss the results.

Aiming at the problem that the traditional intrusion detection method can not effectively deal with the massive and high-dimensional network traffic data of industrial control system (ICS), an ICS intrusion detection strategy based on bidirectional generative adversarial network (BiGAN) is proposed in this paper. In order to improve the applicability of BiGAN model in ICS intrusion detection, the optimal model was obtained through the single variable principle and cross-validation. On this basis, the supervised control and data acquisition (SCADA) standard data set is used for comparative experiments to verify the performance of the optimized model on ICS intrusion detection. The results show that the ICS intrusion detection method based on optimized BiGAN has higher accuracy and shorter detection time than other methods.

Securing cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems requires the identification of how interdependence among existing atomic vulnerabilities may be exploited by an adversary to stitch together an attack that can compromise the system. Therefore, accurate attack graphs play a significant role in systems security. A manual construction of the attack graphs is tedious and error-prone, this paper proposes a model-checking-based automated attack graph generator and visualizer (A2G2V). The proposed A2G2V algorithm uses existing model-checking tools, an architecture description tool, and our own code to generate an attack graph that enumerates the set of all possible sequences in which atomic-level vulnerabilities can be exploited to compromise system security. The architecture description tool captures a formal representation of the networked system, its atomic vulnerabilities, their pre-and post-conditions, and security property of interest. A model-checker is employed to automatically identify an attack sequence in the form of a counterexample. Our own code integrated with the model-checker parses the counterexamples, encodes those for specification relaxation, and iterates until all attack sequences are revealed. Finally, a visualization tool has also been incorporated with A2G2V to generate a graphical representation of the generated attack graph. The results are illustrated through application to computer as well as control (SCADA) networks.

The Automation industries that uses Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are highly vulnerable for Network threats. Systems that are air-gapped and isolated from the internet are highly affected due to insider attacks like Spoofing, DOS and Malware threats that affects confidentiality, integrity and availability of Operational Technology (OT) system elements and degrade its performance even though security measures are taken. In this paper, a behavior-based intrusion prevention system (IPS) is designed for OT networks. The proposed system is implemented on SCADA test bed with two systems replicates automation scenarios in industry. This paper describes 4 main classes of cyber-attacks with their subclasses against SCADA systems and methodology with design of components of IPS system, database creation, Baselines and deployment of system in environment. IPS system identifies not only IT protocols but also Industry Control System (ICS) protocols Modbus and DNP3 with their inside communication fields using deep packet inspection (DPI). The analytical results show 99.89% accuracy on binary classification and 97.95% accuracy on multiclass classification of different attack vectors performed on network with low false positive rate. These results are also validated by actual deployment of IPS in SCADA systems with the prevention of DOS attack.

Cyber-physical systems contribute to building new infrastructure in the modern world. These systems help realize missions reducing costs and risks. The seas being a harsh and dangerous environment are a perfect application of them. Unmanned Surface vehicles (USV) allow realizing normal and new tasks reducing risk and cost i.e. surveillance, water cleaning, environmental monitoring or search and rescue operations. Also, as they are unmanned vehicles they can extend missions to unpleasing and risky weather conditions. The novelty of these systems makes that new command and control platforms need to be developed. In this paper, we describe an implemented architecture with 5 separated levels. This structure increases security by defining roles and by limiting information exchanges.

Industrial Control systems traditionally achieved security by using proprietary protocols to communicate in an isolated environment from the outside. This paradigm is changed with the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things that foresees flexible and interconnected systems. In this contribution, a device acting as a connection between the operational technology network and information technology network is proposed. The device is an intrusion detection system related to legacy systems that is able to collect and reporting data to and from industrial IoT devices. It is based on the common signature based intrusion detection system developed in the information technology domain, however, to cope with the constraints of the operation technology domain, it exploits anomaly based features. Specifically, it is able to analyze the traffic on the network at application layer by mean of deep packet inspection, parsing the information carried by the proprietary protocols. At a later stage, it collect and aggregate data from and to IoT domain. A simple set up is considered to prove the effectiveness of the approach.

With the advancement in technology, inclusion of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the conventional Electrical Power Grid has become evident. The combination of communication system with physical system makes it cyber-physical system (CPS). Though the advantages of this improvement in technology are numerous, there exist certain issues with the system. Security and privacy concerns of a CPS are a major field and research and the insight of which is content of this paper.