Cyber-Physical Testbeds: A Scientific Instrument for Cyber Security Assessment of Critical Infrastructures

The newly discovered threats on Networked Critical Infrastructures (NCIs), e.g. the power grid, including Stuxnet and Flame, served as a wakeup call for the international security community. They revealed major vulnerabilities in today's NCIs, but most importantly they highlighted the lack of an efficient scientific approach to conduct experiments that measure the impact of cyber threats against both the physical and the cyber parts of NCIs. In this paper we present EPIC, a novel cyber security assessment testbed for NCIs. To meet the complexity of today's NCIs, EPIC employs an Emulab-based testbed to recreate the cyber layer and multiple software simulators for the physical layer. Its main advantage is that it can enable real-time interdependency studies and can reveal new insights about the propagation of faults and disruptions. We use EPIC to assess the consequences of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) malfunctions due to cyber attacks in the power grid and their cascading effects to the railway system.

SIATERLIS Christos;  GENGE Bela; 

2019-01-23

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

JRC75975

0001-0782 (online),   

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2602695.2602575,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC75975,   

10.1145/2602575 (online),