Assessing cyber-physical security in industrial control systems
Author(s)
Barrère, Martín
Hankin, Chris
Eliades, Demetrios G
Nicolaou, Nicolas
Parisini, Thomas
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Over the last years, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have become increasingly exposed to a wide range of cyber-physical threats. Efficient models and techniques able to capture their complex structure and identify critical cyber-physical components are therefore essential. AND/OR graphs have proven very useful in this context as they are able to semantically grasp intricate logical interdependencies among ICS components. However, identifying critical nodes in AND/OR graphs is an NP-complete problem. In addition, ICS settings normally involve various cyber and physical security measures that simultaneously protect multiple ICS components in overlapping manners, which makes this problem even harder. In this paper, we present an extended security metric based on AND/OR hypergraphs which efficiently identifies the set of critical ICS components and security measures that should be compromised, with minimum cost (effort) for an attacker, in order to disrupt the operation of vital ICS assets. Our approach relies on MAX-SAT techniques, which we have incorporated in META4ICS, a Java-based security metric analyser for ICS. We also provide a thorough performance evaluation that shows the feasibility of our method. Finally, we illustrate our methodology through a case study in which we analyse the security posture of a realistic Water Transport Network (WTN).
Date Issued
2019-09-01
Date Acceptance
2019-09-01
Citation
2019, pp.49-58
Publisher
BCS Learning & Development
Start Page
49
End Page
58
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Martín Barrère et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 6th International Symposium for ICS & SCADA Cyber Security Research.
Sponsor
Horizon2020
Grant Number
Project ID: 739551
Source
6th International Symposium for ICS & SCADA Cyber Security Research 2019
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2019-09-10
Finish Date
2019-09-12
Date Publish Online
2019-09-01