Building India’s First Cyber-Security Test-Bed for CI

Abstract

Critical infrastructures such as power grid, water treatment plants, chemical plants, oil and gas refineries, transportation systems, etc., are examples of large-scale cyber-physical systems. In the recent years, there has been multitude of cyberattacks on such systems such as STUXNET attack in Iran, BlackEnergy malware and ransomware attacks on power distribution systems in Ukraine, and malware attacks on German Steel plant to mention a few. Critical infrastructure security is a major area of concern for all governments. In the United States, several laboratories such as Sandia National Lab, Idaho National Lab, and National Institutes of Standards have built critical infrastructure cyber-security experimentation test-beds. These test-beds are built with industry-scale equipment from various sectors of critical infrastructures to allow researchers to detect vulnerabilities in multitude of products that are used by utility companies in their systems and to research efficacy of their remediation techniques. These test-beds also allow utilities to bring in hardware and software products for hardware/software-in-the-loop testing for vulnerability detection or cyber-security product validation. In India, there has been no such test-bed for such research and validation activities. In the interdisciplinary center for cyber-security and cyber defense of critical infrastructures (C3i) at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, we are building such a facility—a first in India. We already have built a lab-scale test-bed for power distribution automation and discovered a plethora of vulnerabilities in the architecture, protocols, and widely used products in our test-bed. In this article, we first describe the lab-scale test-bed to provide an insight into the utility of such a test-bed, and then we describe our ongoing development of industry-scale test-beds.