Biblio

In response to the increasing awareness of the Ethernet-based threat surface of industrial control systems (ICS), both the research and commercial communities are responding with ICS-specific security solutions. Unfortunately, many of the properties of ICS environments that contribute to the extent of this threat surface (e.g. age of devices, inability or unwillingness to patch, criticality of the system) similarly prevent the proper testing and evaluation of these security solutions. Production environments are often too fragile to introduce unvetted technology and most organizations lack test environments that are sufficiently consistent with production to yield actionable results. Cost and space requirements prevent the creation of mirrored physical environments leading many to look towards simulation or virtualization. Examples in literature provide various approaches to building ICS test beds, though most of these suffer from a lack of realism due to contrived scenarios, synthetic data and other compromises. In this paper, we provide a design methodology for building highly realistic ICS test beds for validating cybersecurity defenses. We then apply that methodology to the design and building of a specific test bed and describe the results and experimental use cases.

This paper outlines a set of 10 cyber security concerns associated with Industrial Control Systems (ICS). The concerns address software and hardware development, implementation, and maintenance practices, supply chain assurance, the need for cyber forensics in ICS, a lack of awareness and training, and finally, a need for test beds which can be used to address the first 9 cited concerns. The concerns documented in this paper were developed based on the authors' combined experience conducting research in this field for the US Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. The second half of this paper documents a virtual test bed platform which is offered as a tool to address the concerns listed in the first half of the paper. The paper discusses various types of test beds proposed in literature for ICS research, provides an overview of the virtual test bed platform developed by the authors, and lists future works required to extend the existing test beds to serve as a development platform.