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Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation for Industrial Critical Infrastructures with Cyber Physical Test Bed

Industrial and critical infrastructure automation systems, integrated with Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) are becoming lucrative targets for cyber-attackers. Typically these are cyber-physical systems, with cyber components such as sensors, actuators, micro-controllers, programmable logic controllers, or distributed control systems, field-area network, wide-area network etc., overseen by supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA). After the discovery of the Stuxnet in 2009, and multiple other instances of cyber-attacks such as on a German steel plant, Ukraine power distribution system, chemical plant etc., research on securing these systems from cyber-attacks have become very important. However, it is often not permissible to attack the real operational critical systems for vulnerability assessment or testing mitigation techniques. Therefore, virtual or real test beds are required. In this paper we focus on a lab-scale test bed for a 3 phase power distribution system under industrial PLC control, instrumented with relay, power meters, various field protocol switches, supervised by an industrial SCADA system. Main contributions of the paper are (i) case studies of vulnerability assessment of the industrial components of this test bed – components that are being widely deployed in real critical systems throughout the world. (ii) the exploits and their security implications, especially their effect on the physical functioning of the systems; and (iii) mitigation techniques we have deployed to defend against such attacks. We are working with the original equipment manufacturers to disclose these vulnerabilities and in deploying mitigation techniques. A library of exploits and payloads which can be used in similar industrial control systems is under preparation.