Biblio
The increasing integration of information and communication technologies has undoubtedly boosted the efficiency of Critical Infrastructures (CI). However, the first wave of IoT devices, together with the management of enormous amount of data generated by modern CIs, has created serious architectural issues. While the emerging Fog and Multi-Access Edge Computing (FMEC) paradigms can provide a viable solution, they also bring inherent security issues, that can cause dire consequences in the context of CIs. In this paper, we analyze the applications of FMEC solutions in the context of CIs, with a specific focus on related security issues and threats for the specific while broad scenarios: a smart airport, a smart port, and a smart offshore oil and gas extraction field. Leveraging these scenarios, a set of general security requirements for FMEC is derived, together with crucial research challenges whose further investigation is cornerstone for a successful adoption of FMEC in CIs.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition(SCADA) communications are often subjected to various sophisticated cyber-attacks mostly because of their static system characteristics, enabling an attacker for easier profiling of the target system(s) and thereby impacting the Critical Infrastructures(CI). In this Paper, a novel approach to mitigate such static vulnerabilities is proposed by implementing a Moving Target Defense (MTD) strategy in a power grid SCADA environment, leveraging the existing communication network with an end-to-end IP-Hopping technique among trusted peers. The main contribution involves the design and implementation of MTD Architecture on Iowa State's PowerCyber testbed for targeted cyber-attacks, without compromising the availability of a SCADA system and studying the delay and throughput characteristics for different hopping rates in a realistic environment. Finally, we study two cases and provide mitigations for potential weaknesses of the proposed mechanism. Also, we propose to incorporate port mutation to further increase attack complexity as part of future work.
Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSAN) constitute an emerging technology with multiple applications in many different fields. Due to the features of WSAN (dynamism, redundancy, fault tolerance, and self-organization), this technology can be used as a supporting technology for the monitoring of critical infrastructures (CIs). For decades, the monitoring of CIs has centered on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, where operators can monitor and control the behavior of the system. The reach of the SCADA system has been hampered by the lack of deployment flexibility of the sensors that feed it with monitoring data. The integration of a multihop WSAN with SCADA for CI monitoring constitutes a novel approach to extend the SCADA reach in a cost-effective way, eliminating this handicap. However, the integration of WSAN and SCADA presents some challenges which have to be addressed in order to comprehensively take advantage of the WSAN features. This paper presents a solution for this joint integration. The solution uses a gateway and a Web services approach together with a Web-based SCADA, which provides an integrated platform accessible from the Internet. A real scenario where this solution has been successfully applied to monitor an electrical power grid is presented.