Investigating the effect of Network Parameters on Coordinated Cyber Attacks against a Simulated Power Plant

The fact that modern Networked Industrial Control Systems (NICS) depend on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), is well known. Although many studies have focused on the security of these systems, today we still lack the proper understanding of the effects that cyber attacks have on NICS. In this paper we use our previously developed framework to study the effects of coordinated cyber attacks against NICS. Coordinated attacks rely on several infected hosts to disrupt the normal functionality of the system. Within the context of NICS we consider multiple infected control hardware, a highly similar setting to the recently reported Stuxnet worm, the first malware specifically designed to attack NICS. Furthermore we consider that the coordinator is located outside the system, in the Internet, from where it launches attacks by sending messages to each infected control hardware. The experimental results show that coordinated attacks against NICS are highly sensitive respect to communication delays, packet losses and network traffic. Furthermore, we prove that coordinated attacks have a low success rate if there are timing constraints between commands sent to each control hardware. The attack scenarios are implemented with our previously developed framework where an emulation testbed (based on Emulab) is used to recreate ICT components and a soft real-time simulator (based on Simulink) is used for the physical processes.

GENGE Bela;  SIATERLIS Christos; 

2017-09-12

Springer

JRC64949

978-3-642-41475-6,   

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-41476-3_12,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC64949,   

10.1007/978-3-642-41476-3_12,