An analytics framework for heuristic inference attacks against industrial control systems

No Thumbnail Available
File version
Author(s)
Choi, T
Bai, G
Ko, RKL
Dong, N
Zhang, W
Wang, S
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)
Date
2020
Size
File type(s)
Location

Guangzhou, China

License
Abstract

Industrial control systems (ICS) of critical infrastructure are increasingly connected to the Internet for remote site management at scale. However, cyber attacks against ICS - especially at the communication channels between humanmachine interface (HMIs) and programmable logic controllers(PLCs) - are increasing at a rate which outstrips the rate of mitigation. In this paper, we introduce a vendor-agnostic analytics framework which allows security researchers to analyse attacks against ICS systems, even if the researchers have zero control automation domain knowledge or are faced with a myriad of heterogenous ICS systems. Unlike existing works that require expertise in domain knowledge and specialised tool usage, our analytics framework does not require prior knowledge about ICS communication protocols, PLCs, and expertise of any network penetration testing tool. Using 'digital twin' scenarios comprising industry-representative HMIs, PLCs and firewalls in our test lab, our framework's steps were demonstrated to successfully implement a stealthy deception attack based on false data injection attacks (FDIA). Furthermore, our framework also demonstrated the relative ease of attack dataset collection, and the ability to leverage well-known penetration testing tools. We also introduce the concept of 'heuristic inference attacks', a new family of attack types on ICS which is agnostic to PLC and HMI brands/models commonly deployed in ICS. Our experiments were also validated on a separate ICS dataset collected from a cyber-physical scenario of water utilities. Finally, we utilized time complexity theory to estimate the difficulty for the attacker to conduct the proposed packet analyses, and recommended countermeasures based on our findings.

Journal Title
Conference Title

Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2020

Book Title
Edition
Volume
Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
DOI
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement
Item Access Status
Note
Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject

Information and computing sciences

Persistent link to this record
Citation

Choi, T; Bai, G; Ko, RKL; Dong, N; Zhang, W; Wang, S, An analytics framework for heuristic inference attacks against industrial control systems, Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2020, 2020, pp. 827-835